If you are wagering in your first tournament then you have to have some transitions to make. First of all, when you are working with a tournament you have to be much more calculating than you would with a “normal” game of blackjack. The game itself is one of strategy. You aren’t going to find many professional players how have not spent months working on their own skills and coming up with a great strategy to boot. They know how valuable it is to work with the basic strategy chart and commit its theories to memory. No- they don’t profess to know it by heart completely, but they do have a good understanding of the game’s strategy and how it is going to work. They also know how the different moves affect the various potential outcomes of the game. This is how they are able to excel- they come up with their own strategy and make sure that they know how to manipulate it based on the various gaming scenarios the dealer may have at the table. Second of all, when you are working with a tournament you have to pull out all the stops in terms of gaming. You don’t want to sit back because you are playing against the other people at the table this time. If you are used to wagering in single games, then you are used to discounting the other gamers and focusing on the dealer. This isn’t how it works in a tournament. In the tournament arena you suddenly have to concern yourself with the other players. Sure you want to best the dealer, but you also want to get more coins than the other people around your table. It is the only way you can keep on moving up in the rounds to the final table.
Finally, with blackjack play at the tournament level, you have be ready for the art of sabotage. Whether it is mental or actual gaming sabotage, you need to calculate your moves much more when you are wagering. The point of the game is to get to the next rounds and eventually to the final table. The only way to do this is to have a good strategy and know how to use it in any gambling situation.