FT Sill Apache Casino has a tournament going on this upcoming week. I was looking at last year's results for the 2nd round and it gave me some questions. 164 players, 84 advance to 3rd round. The advancers are the top 3 at 24 tables of 7, 8 wild card people with the highest chip count from the 4th-7th, and 4 random draws. If any of the 8 wild card people are one of the random draws, then the wild card is dropped down to the 9th highest chip count and so on. The rules are 3000 in starting chips, 20 hands, 6 decks, S17, 2-1 BJs, no surrender, no insurance, split once, DAS, $5 minimum and no max bet. The tournament is a chip accumulation (chip carryover) so you would start the next round with the chips you had after the last hand (assuming you advanced). You will have the opportunity to buy an additional 5000 in chips for the 3rd round and 10000 in chips for the 28 people in the semi-finals (finals). I bring this up, because it is good in the long run to accumulate chips. You will see people with clearly enough chips to be a wild card, push it all in on the last hand. Last year bottom wild card for the 2nd round was 4000. I never thought about using Stanford Wong's "Casino Tournament Strategy" for setting a goal (limit) for a wild card number in a format like this, but I was just looking at it. I have no idea if it would be applicable. If you ingnored the 3 advance (of course, this is your 1st priority instead of a wildcard) and random draws and just use 1/2 the field advance, then you would get a Wong number of 4242. It is at least in the vicinity of last year's result. So on to the questions: Your are playing the 1st session and thus have no info to go on for a wild card number. It is the last hand and unfortunately (depends on how you look at it) you have 4200 and not in the top 3. 4000 last year was enough. Would you bet the minimum? If you were 4th, 5th, 6th or 7th at your table, would it affect your bet amount? Suppose to contest for 3rd you had to bet at least 500, would you do it? Personally, if I decided to bet more than the minimum, I would probably bet 2100. I will be interested to see if this year's results again fall in the vicinity of the Wong number. Larry
