I do not play tournament but I guess we can cry by receiving a blackjack.
Yes, keeping track of the other player's chip stacks is the most important task you have at a tournament table.
Correlating your opponent's bet when ahead and acting second is still a strong play, however using the count to play your hand in this strategic situation was (theoretically) a big mistake. Your goal is not to maximize the EV of your hand. It is to try to end up with the same or better result than your opponent. There is a table of basic strategy deviations for this in Wong's book which is required knowledge if you play tournaments often. If your opponent beat the dealer's 19, then he had 20 or 21. Vs the dealer 4 it turns out that you played the hand correctly by hitting your 12 (at any count) and standing on your 16 (you should stand at 13 or more).
Most tournament players will tell you that counting at all is a waste of mental resources in tournament play. I made some posts on that topic here years ago.
Last edited by Gronbog; 04-26-2018 at 08:08 AM.
From the intros it looks like a lot of them are Hilton high rollers, which means they are probably pretty bad players. If Mezrich was the host then it must have been season 3. The first 2 seasons had a lot of big name players, but by season 3 a lot of the hype had died down and most of the strong players were eliminated early. It was becoming more of a ploy for the Hilton to lure in whales.
-Sonny-
The only ways this could happen would be if:
- you could not split 10s at all, in which case I feel your pain
- you could not split 10s of different ranks, in which case I feel your greater pain
- you were able to double after taking a card, in which case you should have doubled before reaching 20
Even with no memory of the event at all, since I was not there, I can say that a hard 20 which is not 10-10 must have had more than two cards and so, strictly speaking, you were not "forced" to double it, unless you made the horrible mistake of not doubling it before it became 20.
I'm not trying to be combative. We're discussing legitimate playing strategy deviations for tournament play and this is an important detail of the situation you are describing. Hard 19 is the worst hand that anyone could be "forced" to double without making some kind of previous error.
I should have thought longer about that. Here's one:
You have split 10's to the maximum number of splits allowed. You have doubled all but the final hand appropriately. You still need to get one more max bet working. On the final hand of the split you end up with 10-10. You would then be forced to double it.
I'm not saying that's the situation Flash was in. It's just an extreme case where one would be "forced" to double a hard 20.
Can't disagree with that. I was just using the count for playing decisions only, which actually worked out quite well. It's just that the last hand in the last round (where I was the second hand) where I was stuck in this dilemma. IIRC the other guy had a two card 19 and of course stood.
At any rate the final result was +EV with the 2nd place prize, which was much more than what the buy-in was.
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