You are legally allowed to count cards whether it’s a tournament or not. Correspondingly, the casinos are legally allowed to try to prevent you from counting by implementing various countermeasures. A casino can also take the drastic step of barring you from playing if it determines that you count too well for it to deal to you profitably.
The battle between casinos and card counters is played out daily on blackjack tables all over the world, but it’s not the same when it comes to tournament play. The reason is the casino’s bankroll isn’t under attack by skilled players during a tournament. Yes, someone will win a big prize, but that prize is usually created by player entry fees. So, as you suggest, a skilled player is beating other players rather than the house. Many blackjack tournaments used to be played for live money (players had to put up both an entry fee and a buy-in), but today almost all are played with non-negotiable tournament chips, so there’s no casino exposure.
Even in those early tournaments that were played for real money, the casinos didn’t worry about card counting, because the duration of play was too short for a counter to get much of an edge. Many card counters entered tournaments thinking that they had a big advantage over non-counters, but they were wrong.
In his book Play to Win—A World Champion’s Guide to Winning Blackjack Tournaments Ken Einiger writes:
"Card counting isn’t important in blackjack tournaments. I’ve heard many beginners reason that they can’t be competitive, because they don’t count cards and other competitors do. Nonsense. This game is about betting and position The duration of each round is too short for card counting to have an appreciable effect."
According to Anthony Curtis, he couldn’t be more right. The following is an excerpt from an article Anthony wrote for the newsletter Blackjack Forum:
"I always rub my hands together when I run into card counters on a tournament table. Why? Because they're so predictable. A powerful play in tournament competition is to create the opportunity for a swing when you're behind. That usually means betting big when your opponents bet small (or vice versa). This can be problematic when the key opponent bets after you, because he can simply mirror your bets to the degree that he chooses. Since some card counters would rather be publicly caned than raise their bets into a negative deck, you can create the potential swing any time you want just by betting contrary to the count.
"The most remarkable example of this I've come across occurred in a big tournament in the Bahamas. I was on a table of five and all of my opponents were dyed-in-the-wool card counters. A third of the way through the round the shoe went positive and the four others jumped on it. Having already drifted a few maximum bets down, I was happy to let them go, hoping that a few good hands by the dealer would bring them back to me. But by the time the shoe was finished, I was too. The four were in a dead heat for the lead some eight max bets ahead. Given the one-person-advance format, I was all but sunk. The next shoe, however, quickly went negative. I made a max bet, while everyone else bet the minimum. I won and gained a bet. As we played on, I didn't even worry about what I was dealt. I was busy praying that the count would stay negative so I would continue to be the sole big bettor. It did, I was, and on the last hand I had only to win my bet to advance to the four-man final for $250,000 (alas, my remarkable comeback wasn't consummated). After the round, one of the players who knew me as a card counter came up and said: ‘Nice comeback, but why were you betting so heavily into that huge negative count?’"
Anthony went on to make some of the same points made by Ken Einiger—namely that there are too many more important considerations in tournament play to waste effort and attention on counting cards. This is particularly true in the last 5 to 10 hands, when the only counting you should be doing is of the amount of chips in your opponents’ stacks.
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