I played in an invitational BJ tournament at Harrahs Reno last weekend. It was the strangest game I ever played in. Apparently, Harrahs wants to remove what little bit of skill there was in tournament play and make it purely luck, more like a drawing.

The game was played with 10 decks of cards in a shoe (no use counting that). Also, they left all 10 jokers in and call them wild cards (for players only, for the dealer, they were worth 1). You didn't have to declare the wild card until it was time to pay the hand off. If that wasn't enought to make the game wildly streaky, they paid 10x for any winning hand with 5 cards in it. And all blackjacks were paid 5 to 1!

Basically, you couldn't tell much about who was going to win till the last hand, as the last 5 hands had 1000 limits, so you could easily jump ahead 5000 or even 10000 if you were lucky on the last hand.

I survived the first round, but lost out in the semifinals to a guy who got the winning hand with five cards. Kind of fun, but not much like the 21 game we play in the casino for real money.

Only 25, 100, 500, and 1000 chips were used, but there were a couple more colors in the dealers tray. I had not seen the tournament chips before, but they were plastic 8 suits chips, similar to the ones Harrahs has used for promotions for many years. I didn't get any from the game... even for my own collection. Maybe someone braver can have a try at it. Larry?