How to Change Your Strategy for Roulette Tournaments

It’s become very popular in the past few years to add a skill element and a competitive element to games that are normally only viewed as games of chance. Different types of casino tournaments have been the result, and roulette tournaments are a great example of this. The most typical type of roulette tournament will have you facing off against other players with a limited number of chips in an effort to try to win a place on a leaderboard. The players who come up with the most winnings for their chips will be given prizes based on where they place. The strategy for the tournament setting is a bit different and requires alternative considerations than normal games played for cash.

Roulette Tournament Strategy Basics

There is a fundamental difference in tournament play and cash play when it comes to online roulette. When you’re traditionally playing roulette, you would be trying to maximize your payout rate against the house which is the same thing as saying that you’re trying to maximize your overall profit. In tournament roulette, however, the objective is a little different. Instead of trying to maximize your profit from your tournament chips, you’re just trying to get it high enough to be higher than everyone else. These are slightly different objectives, but they can lead to much different styles of play.

Suppose that there are 100 players in a tournament, and 20 spots on the leaderboard are going to receive prizes. Suppose that players start with 1,000 in tournament chips that they have to wager through, and leaderboard positions are based on the winnings of bets with those chips. Imagine a scenario where the person who comes in 21st place has 1,800 in winnings and the person who comes in 100th place is particularly unlucky and has just 180 in winnings. Even though one of these is worth ten times the other in terms of tournament chips, both stacks are worth the same amount: nothing.

If you think about this example for a bit, you’ll understand the importance of being aggressive with your betting to try to place in the money. Winning the entire tournament is less important than coming in the upper portion of the leaderboard, and you’ll need to wager aggressively to do this.

Aggressive Roulette Tournament Strategies

When you first start out in a roulette tournament, you’re looking to secure a big win right off the bat that you can work with. Divide your tournament chips up into about 30 to 50 equal-sized units, and bet these units on high-risk/high-reward wagers like split bets and straight up bets to try to pull in a few sizable wins. If you keep missing, then keep trying while increasing your wager size slightly over time to compensate for lost bets. Sometimes you’re just going to lose, but that’s the luck element of the game coming out, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

That’s how to play the early game, but what should you do if you establish a decent amount of winnings with plenty left to wager? In this case, you should back off of the high-risk/high-reward strategy and switch towards a strategy that uses a more moderate risk. The idea here is that you want to add to your already established stack with a string of low-variance, small and medium wins. You do that by betting on column bets, evens bets and other low-risk bets with payouts in the 2:1 and 1:1 range. Pad your winnings in this way to get a good shot at coming out with a solid position on the leaderboard.

The Hail Mary Play

Sometimes you’re not going to be able to establish much in terms of winnings overall. If you get down to the last 20 percent of your tournament chips without having achieved enough in winnings to make yourself competitive, then you only have one option left. The Hail Mary play is designed to be a long-shot to get you into the running for a money prize, but you can’t wait until you only have a few chips left to make it. This is when you place all of your remaining chips on a straight-up or split bet and hope for the best. This is a long-shot play, but it has a much better chance of winning than just letting your chips dwindle down with low-risk bets that have no chance at all of getting you into the paid places on the leaderboard.