Atlantic City Hilton is running a $25k winner-take-all blackjack tournament on Friday, May 26th. I believe that the Friday tournament is a table elimination tournament. Atlantic City Hilton will be inviting an unspecified number of preferred customers to this tournament. In addition, there are 40 spots in this tournament which will be awarded in qualifying tournaments on Thursdays in May. The Thursday qualifying tournaments are 15 hand, accumulation style events (start with $2k, min bet 100, no max bet) which run from 1pm to 7pm. To play in a Thursday qualifying event, you simply need to have an AC Hilton player card (or sign up for one if you don't have one). They post a leader board during the course of the day. In addition to the top 10 in a Thursday tournament qualifying for the winner-take-all final, the top scorer on each Thursday wins $1,000. I was surprised at how low a score it took to qualify today. The lowest qualifying score was $5,000. With one person left to play, the highest score was 46,500, but the last player to play (clearly not a sophisticated tournament player) managed to beat it, raising the lowest qualifying score from 4000 to 5000. I don't know how many players they had. They used just one blackjack table for this event, and had players play head-on against the dealer. I guess I'd be surprised if they had much over 200 entrants.
