More and more casinos are offering blackjack tournaments, especially during the slower winter months. They can be fun, but before you enter it's best that you know the basics of how to play blackjack under tournament conditions.

Tournaments work like this. Every contestant is assigned to a table and every player will begin with the same bankroll. Players will play blackjack over a specified period of time (or number of hands) and at the end, the player with the most amount of money is declared the table winner. Table winners then compete against each other until you end up with 6 (or 7) finalists, who compete for the top prize.

GSN has teamed with the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for the second season of World Series Of Blackjack, the network's highly-rated casino franchise. World Series Of Blackjack will feature 40 of the world's best amateur and professional blackjack players and will award $500,000 in total prize money.

The grand prize for the invitational tournament is $250,000 to the winner -- up from last year's $100,000. Notable players at the Golden Nugget tournament include MIT Mike, last year's winner, John Ferguson, and Charles Gorson among others. The 13-episode series will premiere January 11 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT. The announcement was made today by Ian Valentine, Senior Vice President of Programming, GSN.

Here is a trick to get a little extra edge at the blackjack table.

If you play against a skilled dealer who performs no more than two riffles and interleaves the cards evenly and precisely, have a look to see what happens to the aces that are dealt when they are scooped up into the discard tray. If many aces are put back into the discard tray with clumps of tens, you will find that in the following shoe you will get more blackjacks than you would expect mathematically. This is because the riffle action tends to leave initially adjacent cards together with greater frequency than chance alone would suggest. Not only will you gain from the fact that more blackjacks are dealt, but card counters will find high counts are more advantageous, since they depend for much of their edge on blackjacks. However, use your count as you would normally.

A recent report form Atlantic City announced Resorts casino and Trump properties are dealing single deck Blackjack games. As knowledgeable Blackjack player I got real excited when I hear the news. However after “reading the small print” as they say, my excitement turned into disappointment.

What are they?
A typical blackjack tournament consists of several rounds of play, with tables of 6 or so players competing against each other in each round. The format is usually an elimination format, where only 1 or 2 players at each table will advance to the next round of play.

A forum was held on Monday in Washington, discussed the legalisation of online gambling in the US. The event was sponsored by BetOnSports, and was attended by academics, and representatives from within the industry, as well as figures from the media and advertising sectors. The overall verdict was that online gambling should exist in a properly legislated and regulated way within the States.

Blackjack is certainly of the most popular games that can be found at both the online casinos and the land based casinos. Online other games that can be found at the online casino, such as slots or roulette, Blackjack requires skill, practice and a strong strategic approach...