I made a post post about cruise ship tournaments here earlier today: https://www.blackjacktournaments.com/threads/the-luck-factor-and-unskilled-opponents.9042/ While the conclusion was a somewhat tongue in cheek, there is usually something to be learned when playing any event. At the tournament on the ship on which I recently sailed, a situation developed which is probably familiar to most here, but may be of interest to some newer to tournament play. To recap, the format is accumulation during the first round. They ran a table for a short while with 7 hand sessions and kept a lead board of the top 7 scores. At the end of the accumulation round, the top 7 scores advanced to the final table. The initial bankroll was 500 and the limits were 25 min, 500 max. The flow of entrants was starting to ebb and I decided it was time to enter. The leader board was not visible but they announced the 7th score and, uncharacteristically, it was less than the initial bankroll at 450. Then, after I took my seat, they announced that this would be the final session. At first glance, it would seem that all I had to do was avoid losing more than 25 to advance or more than 50 to end up in a playoff for the 7th spot. But that's not really the situation ... First of all, every other player at my table also began with 500, making us all tied for the final spot at the start of the session. So not only did I need to track the leader board, I also needed to track the scores of those at my table. Now this is always a consideration in an accumulation event when the leader board is known, but usually the cutoff score is much higher than the initial bankroll, so the chance of several players making it from the same table are somewhat lower and you only need to track the scores of those who are threatening to make it. In this case every player at my table had a good chance to make it! I realized that the situation I was in was really a table of 14 players, the scores of 7 of which would not change while the other 7 scores would and with 7 advancing. I needed to know more than just the current 7th place score becase each player from my table who hit the leader board would knock off that bottom score and could potentially knock off other lower scores. At first the supervisor resisted my request to know all of the leader board scores, insisting that I only needed to know the 7th place score. But after being persistent, she finally told me (and everyone) the bottom four scores: 450, 500, 600 and 750. I already knew that the top two scores were 1,800 and 1,350 and decided that knowing 6 of the 7 scores would probably be good enough and let it go at that (shame on me for not tracking all of the scores myself while observing!). I started out with a minimum bets in order to see what everyone else would do. As it happens, 4 other players got lucky (in defiance of my previous post) and crept up with medium sized bets so that they were all above the 4th place score of 750. With the top two scores being somewhat high and the 3rd place score unknown, I was now 5th in a 4 advance out of 7 situation with 4 hands to go. A 1/3 progression would put me in the middle of the advancing pack of 4 players and it succeeded on the second (all-in) bet. From there I was able to correlate my way to finishing second among the pack of 4 or 5th overall to advance. On the final table, 5 out of the 7 players found themselves out of contention due to a tough dealer. Then BR1 gave me the low on the final hand (I was betting last) and I won the tournament as we both lost our hands. Not much money, but another victory for skills and situational awareness over luck in a cruise ship tournament.
