Staying BR* in Tournaments

Casino games tournaments are fun, and they can be profitable too. In upcoming articles, we will continue to publish a series of excerpts from Stanford Wong’s book, Casino Tournament Strategy.

Most of any advantage in a craps tournament is from simple money-management -- win or bust out trying. Rarely will a tournament pro lose with any of his or her chips left.

BR* means any bankroll that advances you to the next round of the tournament. In a sports analogy, it means you make the playoffs; if already in, you advance to the next round of the playoffs.

The most formidable opponent is the one who is most likely to beat you if you ignore them. When you are BR*, your most important opponent usually is the person with the most chips that is not BR*. But an opponent with $400 who is willing to make big bets is more likely to beat you than someone who has $500 but won’t make big bets when called for.

Correlating to Stay BR*

When you are BR*, decide which of your opponents is the most serious threat. Once you have identified that person, try to correlate your bets with that person’s bets. That is, bet the same way the most serious threat is betting, but smaller amounts. Your goals are if the most serious threat wins a bet you want to stay ahead of him or her, and if that person loses a bet you want to have enough chips left to still be BR*.

If two opponents are equally serious threats, pick out one to correlate with. This is particularly true if they bet opposite from each other; correlate with one and let the other one have a shot at catching you. You have no better alternative. The only alternative is to correlate with neither and let both have a shot at you, which will result in one of them passing you.

Sometimes a person other than the one with which you have decided to correlate wins enough to get ahead of you. And sometimes the person with whom you are trying to correlate manages to get ahead of you. In either case, when you find you no longer are BR*, go all in to attempt to regain the BR* spot.

Waiting For the Last Few Minutes to Become BR*

You cannot wait for the last five or ten minutes (or five or ten rolls) to get the BR* spot, for three reasons. First, if you are behind you are forced to bet first; if you try to wait for your opponents to bet first, they will not bet and the stickman will call “No more bets.”

Second, you have almost no time to analyze the situation, and with everyone’s bankrolls fluctuating wildly you may not be able to come up with the bets that give you the best chance of catching up. Betting while ahead is easier to do with limited thinking time, since it means simply matching someone else’s bets.

Third, toward the end everyone tends to bet big, and if you are not BR* you may find yourself locked out; no matter where you put your money, enough people ahead of you in bankrolls may also be making the same bets so that you do not have a chance. A major move is only effective if the people you are trying to catch are not making the same bets that you are making.

This article is part of a series, to be continued…

Excerpted with permission from Casino Tournament Strategy by Stanford Wong, edited for this format.