The traditional forms of blackjack involves just the player and the house, there’s no interaction with other players. Tournament blackjack is an adaptation of this game in which there will be an actual competition between a number of players, being similar to the ideas of poker tournaments.

Within tournament blackjack, each player will pay an entry fee and/or a buy-in and will receive a number of chips. The goal in this game is not to beat the house, but to defeat the other players by ending up at the end with more chips than the other players.

The first blackjack tournaments were started in 1978 at the Sahara hotel, having a $250 entrée fee, a $500 buy in. About 2000 players competed in this tournament which was divided into rounds, which lasted 55 minutes each. Since the players did not compete against the banks, but against each other, the rules were rather permissive for splitting and doubling and there was no point in taking any measures against card counters, so it was played from one single deck.

The blackjack went out of style starting with the late 1980s because casino owners thought that this kind of tournaments would encourage gamblers to learn the skills of card counting, which could affect their regular blackjack operations. It was revived in 2002 at the Las Vegas Hilton and now they are found at many land-based and online casinos.

There are two types of tournaments: single table and multi-table. In the single player tournaments, there is just one round and the winner is simply the player who has the most chips at the end. There is a minimum and a maximum bet for each hand and the cards that have been dealt are visible to everyone. As in poker, the players decide a bet and the first player who receives the cards would have to make the first decision.

In a multi-table online blackjack tournament, there are a number of rounds, each of which has a number of hands. Each round begins with an equal number of chips for each player and at the end of each round, at each table, the player with most chips advances to the next round. As players keep quitting the game, the number of tables will decrease, until there is just one final table, the winner of which is the winner of the whole tournament.

Usually, the other players at the last table will win some prizes as well.

Since the competition is between players and not against the house, some online poker tournament sites allow card counting and even encourage players to do it to improve their gameplay.