Cherokee Casino proves they are innovating in poker as well as blackjack, by holding the first-ever Duplicate Poker event. Read about it here: http://www.pokernews.com/news/2007/2/first-duplicate-poker-oklahoma.htm
Duplicate: Duplicate: Outstanding wither poker or bj. Harder for bj. But, yeah, yeah, yeah, ( as only a preface and not an attempt to steal anyone's monicker,) in passing, I taught o dat. Cause, then you'd have HARD results to all the percentage predictabilities. And of course, Juneau.....Observable, quantifiable and repeatable. I rumble on. But, that is the ONE thing lacking in the math realm of the BJ world. There is no system in place to actually record, actual results of the best laid plans of men and mice. The closest we come are the final five hand reports from those resolute enough to put the time into recording them. But, I dare say, take five remaining hands, quantify by percentage the highest percentage play and then record the results to the actual outcome and what have you got, gobbleydodaly dook a lok.
Duplicate BJ Problem with dup bj would be that the players have a choice on how to act on each hand. Therefore, no matter how you stack the deck, hands will be different as soon as someone makes a different play. I'd love to see it--would certainly help luck vs skill argument--but don't see how it could work.
Duplicate: Original two card hands are the duplicate. Subsequent draws from an 8 or 12 deck continuous shuffler. About as close to an infinite deck as one could get, without actually having an infinite deck.
The equivalent of duplicate poker in blackjack would be the match-play format, written about in Wong's book, and used long ago in some events. I've never played that format. Every player gets exactly the same cards. You decide your bet amount, whether to surrender, hit, stand, double or split. Everyone shares the hit cards as well.
Maybe worth a try... MMmmmm..... Maybe someone will try and put together a duplicate blackjack tournament in the near future, you never know...LOL I have be asked about my thoughts on holding tournaments with "Super-fun 21" and "Blackjack Switch". Both of those would make for interesting events. The way I look at it, is if the casinos are willing to host "OPEN" events for us reguardless of the format, we are starting to move in the right direction.
As a duplicate bridge player, I don't think Duplicate BJ is worth your time, even if it is feasible. The best format would probably be the match-play head-to-head format. But if you wanted to do it in a multi-player tournament format, I imagine that it would look something like this: - There are n tables of 6 people. - A single deck is dealt into 6 stacks of 7 (one stack per player) and a stack of 10 for the dealer. - For each player, the dealer flips up the player's first 2 cards. As the player takes hits, the dealer would flip up additional cards from the player's stack. If the player wishes to split, cards are flipped in order, but when a player's deck is empty, they get no more hits. - The dealer flips his cards in order and play is resolved. - All of the cards are returned to the face down order they began at and are placed in a custom tray, which is passed to the next table in order, as a new deck of cards is passed to table #1. So now, the first table plays hand #2 while table #2 is playing hand #1. Hands continue to pass to the next highest table until each table play all 25 hands in order. - And the end of the round, each seat #1 is compared against the other seat #1s in the tournament. The player in each seat number who finished with the highest ranking advances (or just scores the most points if this was not run elimination-style). Ties could be broken by total chip count or chip differential. --------------- Of course, there are a lot of problems with duplicate-style tournaments. First of all is the complexity of the tournament. Second, a tournament of this style is easy for people to cheat at by learning what happened with the cards at a prior table. Tables would have to be silent to prevent overhearing results, and spectators could not be allowed to move or convey information to other tables. Finally, while I guess knowing that with the cards you were dealt, you were the only player able to manage a 3rd place finish in that seat means something, there were so many other variables that I don't think you gained that much running it duplicate-style. A tournament of this style could also be held online, but cheating is a huge risk here as well. Someone with 2 accounts could be playing at one table and know exactly what is going to happen at the 2nd table. For this reason, online bridge tournaments that are played for money cannot be played duplicate-style.