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TOURNAMENT STRATEGY:

KNOW YOUR OPPONENT

By Kenneth R. Smith

Ken Smith hosts the popular website www.BlackjackInfo.com and the new site for tournament players www.BlackjackTournaments.com. Ken has written tournament articles for Blackjack Confidential magazine. You can subscribe to his free email newsletter for blackjack players at http://www.blackjackinfo.com.

No matter what the game, it pays to know your competition. Knowing what to expect from your opponents gives you extra information to use in the battle. That’s as true in gambling as it is in sports. No-limit Texas Hold’em is the obvious example, where the game is more about the personalities at the table than the cards that are dealt. While tournament blackjack doesn’t have much of a bluffing element, that doesn’t mean that information about your competitors isn’t valuable. On the contrary, if you aren’t paying attention to the play of your adversaries, you’re probably not winning as often as you could.

While the early hands of a tournament round often seem like filler until the action heats up at the end, those same hands offer an opportunity to zero in on the characteristics of your opponents. Is that player in seat one a minimum bettor every hand, or do they seem to parlay after a win? Is seat two using some kind of negative progression, or are those bets correlated to the count? How about those unorthodox plays in seat three? Is he trying to hold onto his slim lead by correlating with other hands at the table?

Answers to these kinds of questions can provide valuable help later in the game when you’re on the button and wondering what players might bet behind you. If you can accurately guess what a player will bet, then you’ve reduced the cost of being on the button on a particular hand.

Here are some of my favorite ways to use these kinds of observations.

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