Hockey Mex

I’m excited to talk about the ins-and-outs of Elimination Black Jack. I’ll keep it to the straight rules, however, and leave the strategy for another session. What the game does, however, is wonderfully combine well-known aspects of blackjack with the feel, the sensation and mindset of poker.

Starting with the basics, every Black Jack Online Tournament starts with 30 hands. This is elimination gaming, so at certain points throughout the 30 hands, the player with the least amount of money is shown the door. When this happens might depend on where you’re playing, but the traditionally accepted points are after the eight, sixteenth and twenty-fifth hands.

As you might guess, keeping the highest chip stack among all the players is critical, and thus adds the interesting element not usually considered in a blackjack game…competing against your fellow players, not the dealer. Thus, getting inside their heads, and your own personal strategy, is crucial to staying in the game. And as you’ll see soon, a few other poker tricks push their way into the fold throughout the tournament structure.

In the early stages of the tournament, the black jack rules are fairly straight forward, each person starts with a certain amount in chips. You can set it to be however much you want, of course. In the Ultimate Blackjack Tournament show on TV, they began with $25K. Whatever this amount is, by the way, will also serve as the maximum bet. A minimum bet also is set.

As the game begins, each player has only a short amount of time to make a decision on his or her hand. Less than half a minute, usually. You’ll get a little more time to decide (usually 20-25 seconds more) on one of the three elimination hands.

Now, here’s a twist, and here’s where online gambling pushes its way through. Each player has the ability to make a “secret bet.” It can be used whenever you want during the round. If you decide to place this bet, you also can hide your decision made for the remainder of that hand, with the exception of splits and hits.

One big note that’s different from traditional blackjack: You can split same-value cards regardless of whether they’re actually the same card (queen and a ten, king and a jack, for example). Aces can only be split once, while all other combos can be split up to three times.

Those are the tournament black jack rules, pretty simple. The winner is determined by whoever has the most chips at the end of the 30 hands. If you watch the tournaments, or if you venture a chance to play in one of your own, you see a significant shift in demeanor from the usual talkative, friendly blackjack game among players to a more reserved (at times) affair of studying your competition and laying down bluffs to throw them off their betting game.