Russ Hamilton is believed to be the inventor of elimination blackjack, a competition format of conventional blackjack. It I played in various casinos on the Ultimate Black Jack Tour. It merges the blackjack game along with the components of No Limit Texas Hold’Em. UltimateBet.com is a sponsor of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, it offers online elimination for blackjack contests.
Rules
In Elimination Blackjack most of the times the length of the round is thirty hands. The player starts the game with between $10,000 and $100,000 worth of chips, well this depends on the organization hosting the even. Many organizations follow their own rules, however Elimination Blackjack normally has the following rules:
- The house should stay on at soft 17 and below, and must hit on hard 17 and above.
- A payer can be allowed to separate the pairs up to 4 times.
- Six desk shoe is used
- The bet made by the player must be within the minimum and maximum bet allowed at the table.
- The player has to give up their hand and recover one half of their actual bet.
- If the up card for the house is an Ace, the player may buy an insurance.
- Player can only double down with two cards
- Per table maximum 7 players are allowed
- To make a decision the player has 25 seconds in a normal hand and in “elimination hand” the player would have 45 seconds.
Few organizations have a “secret bet” in which the players are not aware about the value of that player’s bet, till that player’s hand is completed. Most of the organizations have this option but can be used only once in any round of the competition.
Eliminations
Based on the organization hosting the event, , a player can be eliminated from the competition in three ways:
If he/she loses all the chips
Not having the minimum chips for placing the bet.
After playing certain number of hands, you are the player remaining with the least chips, in such cases normally the cutoff points are hands #8, #16, and #25. The player will ALWAYS be eliminated from the game in the “elimination hand”, even though if the player was eliminated in the last hand. Normally the last player at the table would be considered to be the winner or the player with the largest number of chips would win at the end of the thirty hands.
Elimination Blackjack is the most popular type of tournament format today mainly because it is very fast paced and it has more interesting turns and twists throughout the game. Blackjack at casinos is generally not a very exciting game for spectators but with the elimination format, the game has a fierce competition spirit which makes it interesting for the viewers too. For this reason there are so many different tournaments today which are based on the elimination format and quite a lot of them are also very high profile televised tournaments which are viewed by millions of people all over the world.
