It has been a while since I played in a tournament. I just received an invitation from Bally's Las Vegas for their Blackjack Getaway tournament. I have decided that I will attend. The description of the tournament is a little unusual. It sounds like there are only two rounds. In the end of the second round, they add up the chips and whoever has the highest chip count out of 400 some entrants wins the tournament. Accumulation format? Is anyone familiar with these kind of tournaments? My question is "what is the correct strategy?" Since you are not only competing against the people at your table and don't know the chip count for other players at the other tables, should you bet low or high? Do you think it is a good idea to count or track cards and play like you would normally play blackjack? You can find the description for the tournament on this website at this link. https://www.blackjacktournaments.com/oldtourn/viewtourn.php?infoID=288
Accumulation strategy The best strategy in accumulation events is quite simple. Bet big, and get lucky! I recommend max bets starting on hand one, particularly if the rounds are under 30 hands each. If you want to set a particular goal, then you could minimum bet from there to the end if you reach your goal early. Determining an appropriate target is difficult however. One common mistake players make is to pull back in the first round once they've gotten to a total they think is 'halfway there', assuming they will be able to win the other half in round two. Don't make that mistake. The easiest time to accumulate more chips is in round one when you've already amassed a big chip stack. That way you can afford some losing hands and still bounce back. The good news is that you'll likely have a big advantage over much of the field, who will play much more conservative than this strategy. The bad news is that this strategy isn't much fun, and most of the time you'll zero out in a hurry. A rule of thumb that is sometimes useful in estimating a good target: Wong's book advocates looking at the square root of the ratio of advancing to non-advancing players, and using that as a multiple of the initial bankroll. In this case, his rule would predict that the first place finisher out of 400 players would amass a stack equal to Sqrt(400) = 20 times the initial bankroll. That's probably too high, because of max bet limitations, but it will give you an idea of how extreme your luck needs to be to win an event like this. I'd probably shoot for 10 to 15 times my starting bank. Most likely that means I would be max-betting all the way through.
