To most readers, it must seem like I've been involved in tournament blackjack from the very beginning. But I'm just as sure that there are readers out there that will know better than that. The truth is that blackjack tournaments were well-established long before I started playing them fourteen years ago. In fact, it's taken until now, in 2008, that I can claim to have been involved for at least half of the lifetime of blackjack tournaments.

The real veterans of the tournament trail are the guys who started at the very beginning, back in 1979 at the Sahara in Las Vegas. The first blackjack tournament ever held was called the World Championship of Blackjack, and it was the brainchild of two brothers named Fishman. Attendance was very strong at these early tournaments, with more than a thousand players buying in to play the $500 live money events. After a few years, the Fishman brothers moved on to other things, and their IGP tournament company faded away. No matter though; tournament blackjack was here to stay, as more and more casinos began to see that tournaments could draw gamblers to their property. What the Fishman’s had conceived lived on beyond their wildest dreams.

Of course, it also didn't take long for savvy gamblers to see that tournament strategy was nothing like regular blackjack strategy. With such large fields of inexperienced players, it had to be a very exciting time for the sharp players of the day. Indeed, those early years saw the dominance of groups of advantage gamblers who made a small fortune playing tournaments. Unfortunately, with that success by a limited numbers of players, it was somewhat inevitable that tournaments would become less appealing to the casinos themselves. After all, it's no secret that casinos prefer "square action," instead of "sharp action," at their tables. It's even worse if the casino's "good" square customers start complaining about the same group of "wise guys" always winning the tournaments.

Nonetheless, tournaments survived and even thrived. Despite the casinos' apparent love/hate relationship with blackjack tournaments, the events still provided a good way to fill the tables during normally slow times. While the attendance would never again reach the massive numbers seen in the early IGP events, there was certainly a large group of interested players that began to travel the circuit, scheduling trips to attend many of the larger tournaments. That was the state of affairs when I came to the game.

Casinos came to my home state of Mississippi in 1992, and I began to take a lot more interest in the game of blackjack. While I had studied the game briefly before that, it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything more. After all, Vegas and its green felt tables were a long way away. Once the first casino opened near home, my interest returned and I studied the mathematics of the game intently.

So it was that I happen to be in the Grand Casino in Gulfport, MS in the summer of 1994 when I noticed a sign about a weekly blackjack tournament. And, what a nice weekly event it was, with a $50 entry fee and a $10,000 prize pool every week. In coming months, I rarely missed an event, and my bankroll grew quickly as a result. There were a handful of sharp players in these events, and the final table was usually drawn from the same handful of names week after week. I picked off a first-place win worth $5,000 in my first month of play, and went on to duplicate that feat countless times over the next few years.

For me, the late 90s were a fantastic boon to my bankroll, as the wins kept rolling in. It was during those years that I accomplished what I still consider to be the most amazing feat of my tournament career. The Isle of Capri casino in Biloxi, MS held a medium sized tournament three times a year, which featured a $100 entry fee and a $20,000 prize pool, with $10,000 for first place. It now seems odd in hindsight that this event would be considered our "big" tournaments, because every week we still had the $10,000 prize pool events.

Still, with an entry fee of twice as much and a schedule of only three events per year, these events were heavily anticipated by all of us in the area. In one particularly amazing stretch, I managed to win first place in that Isle event five times in a three-year stretch. From the first win to the last, it was a run of five first places in eight tries. There's an awful lot of luck involved in a run like that, and of course I knew that at the time. But it is also not surprising that my bolstered confidence had me starting to head out on the tournament trail a lot more seriously.

In the next few years, I played tournaments all over the country. I played in Mississippi on the Gulf Coast and in Tunica. I played in Louisiana. I played in both Chicago and Peoria, Illinois. In Nevada, I played events in Las Vegas, Laughlin, Lake Tahoe, and Jean. I played in the Bahamas. I headed to Minnesota and discovered a vibrant tournament community there. Along the way, I began to report on my exploits for a tournament magazine called Blackjack Confidential, along with several other regular columnists. Fans of that magazine will, without a doubt, hold fond memories of one of the best, the late Joe Butterfield, aka "GI Joseph." Joe's experiences on the tournament trail were followed by a legion of fans, me included.

So it was for quite a few years. Many of us tournament regulars came to know each other well. The appeal of the tournament trail was as much about friendship, as it was about competition. The same players appeared at sizeable events no matter where they were located. Sequences of back-to-back events in Las Vegas would draw the "usual suspects" out for a week of events, where you changed venues every couple of days. Even the Vegas cab drivers started to catch on to the circuit. After you had loaded your bags into the cab, once the driver realized you weren't headed for the airport but instead to another casino, he might well ask if you were in town for the tournaments.

Sometime around 1996 I decided to create a website about blackjack. The Internet was still relatively young at the time, and there really was not all that much information on blackjack available. I posted a useful tool called the Blackjack Basic Strategy Engine, where players could input the rules of their favorite casino and get an accurate basic strategy chart for that particular game. The site immediately became fairly popular. In January of 1998, I moved the site from its original complicated address to the new domain BlackjackInfo.com. Over time, it came to dominate the search listings for the term blackjack, and became the world's most visited blackjack website, a distinction it still holds today.

In 2003, Blackjack Confidential magazine decided to stop publishing, and the loss was felt all over the tournament community. In that time, I decided to launch a new site to fill the need for tournament fans to share information about upcoming events. BlackjackTournaments.com was launched in November of 2003, and continues to be the best online community for blackjack tournament players. Among other popular features, you'll find an extensive schedule of upcoming tournaments, which is maintained by the members themselves. It's a terrific example of the power of community.

Blackjack's presence on the Internet certainly wasn't limited to only the informational type sites that I launched. True online gambling was there too, and it could be surprisingly profitable for the savvy player. I started playing online in 2000 and made a lot of money by playing for the generous online bonus money that was offered to players as an incentive. In all my gambling experiences, I've rarely seen such a lucrative opportunity as bonus hunting online.

Tournaments also popped up online, with Global Player casino being the first to launch true multi-player blackjack tournaments. Later there were others entering this field, such as Bet21.com (a skin of UltimateBet), Golden Palace Blackjack, and Blackjack21.com. For a while, online gambling and online tournaments seemed to really be gaining speed. Then, in late 2006, legislators in the US dealt a fatal blow to the nascent industry. Slipping the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act into a completely unrelated port security bill, Congress and President Bush made the online casinos' transfer of funds for the purposes of gambling illegal. Overnight, the entire industry changed. Billions of dollars were lost in market value, as many large publicly traded companies lost almost all their value.

On a personal note, the timing could not have been worse. Just a month before the bill was passed, I had landed a substantial celebrity sponsorship deal with Golden Palace, one of the online casinos readying a new tournament blackjack product for market. My deal, along with the entire product from Golden Palace was doomed by the new law. In addition, the bulk of the advertising revenue for my popular BlackjackInfo.com site was lost overnight. C'est la vie. One day soon, I hope the US is again a viable market for regulated and taxed online casinos.

In the 2000s, the Internet was not the only new frontier for tournament blackjack. Other major developments in tournament blackjack were the Las Vegas Hilton Million Dollar Blackjack tournaments, and the first coverage of tournaments on TV. The Hilton's series of monthly tournaments leading to a final event with a one million dollar first place prize reenergized tournament players everywhere, and brought back many players who hadn't competed in years. In fact, the first LVH Million winner was Eddie Rhoades, who hadn't played in many events at all in the years since he had won one of the first IGP tournaments. The Hilton tournament continued for several years with TV coverage on the Travel Channel.

However, it was cable network’s GSN that really shined the spotlight of TV on tournaments. Kevin Belinkoff is an executive at GSN, and after he experienced the excitement of tournament play himself, he saw the potential for a blackjack show as offering something different from the dominance of poker shows on the air. So was born the World Series of Blackjack (WSOB). The first season featured 25 invited players, competing for a prize pool of $250,000. Three more seasons followed, as the field expanded to 40 players and the prize pool increased to a million dollars in cash.

GSN's venture into televised blackjack also led others to consider the opportunities offered by the television market. Russ Hamilton is a World Series of Poker champion, who also has experience in tournament blackjack. After participating in one of GSN's seasons of WSOB, Russ came up with an alternative tournament format that he felt would increase the excitement level needed for TV. He launched the Ultimate Blackjack Tour (UBT), whose first season was bankrolled with a healthy prize pool of more than a million dollars. Using Hamilton's innovative Elimination Blackjack rules, the shows did indeed bring more excitement to the concept, and two seasons of shows have aired so far on the major television network CBS.

After four seasons of WSOB on the GSN network, and two seasons of UBT, televised blackjack seems to have run into trouble. Ratings of both shows in the most recent seasons were lower than hoped, and the future of the shows is uncertain. Neither entity has announced plans for a new season of shows, nor is either franchise thought to be currently pursuing additional productions for TV.

So, why the collapse of interest? It appears that no matter how fascinating we diehards find the game, it just doesn't work for the general population. I think the main problem is that the game is just too difficult to play well. At a minimum level, playing well requires players to do basic arithmetic in their head at the table. For many players, that just sounds like too much work. Even for a TV audience aided by a skilled commentator, it takes a fair amount of mental effort to follow the strategy, and the twists and turns the game takes. That's just not what a typical television audience is looking for when they sit down to watch. Blackjack and television just aren't a good fit it would seem.

I can't guess where this trend will bottom out, or whether or when tournaments might come back in favor. But I'm afraid there's no doubt that for now the tournament scene is decidedly less interesting than it has been for years. Does this mean that tournaments are dead and gone? Of course not. There are still reasonable events being held at venues around the country, but the size of most events has been scaled back. More and more casinos have either cancelled their events, or switched them to invite-only affairs for their most favored players. If you're a fan of tournament blackjack, it's time now to start mentioning that fact to your casino hosts. If you are invited to fill out a survey form after visiting a casino, make a point of mentioning your interest in future blackjack tournaments.

As a person who has gotten immeasurable joy and challenge from blackjack events for many years, I hope we see yet another resurgence of tournament blackjack. For those who enjoy the challenge, there's nothing quite like it.