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Ken Smith hosts the popular website www.BlackjackInfo.com as well as the
online tournament community at www.BlackjackTournaments.com.  Considered one of the best tournament players in the country, he has appeared on TV in GSN's World Series of Blackjack 2004 and 2005, the Las Vegas Hilton Million Dollar Championship II finals, and is also featured in the upcoming Ultimate Blackjack Tour.  You can subscribe to his free email newsletter at http://www.blackjackinfo.com/news/.

This month we’ll take a break from the detail-heavy specifics of optimal play and instead focus on some of the basics of effective tournament play. Blackjack tournament strategy breaks cleanly into two areas, playing strategy and betting strategy. The easier of the two is generally playing strategy. A player who simply sticks reasonably close to basic strategy is probably making very few significant tournament mistakes in the play of his or her hands. However, bet-sizing decisions late in the round offer plenty of opportunities for big mistakes.

But that’s late in the round. What about the early and middle parts of a round? I think the importance of bet-sizing decisions in the early and middle parts of a round is often overestimated. There are good arguments for several different approaches. If there is a "basic strategy" for betting, it would be based on the simple idea that smaller bets mean smaller expected losses due to the house edge. That’s a great first principle, but it’s a rare tournament round indeed where just nickel-betting proves to be effective from first hand to last.

So, how should we approach the general question of how to size our bets?

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