Patent ID: 7591470

Claim:
A method for conducting a blackjack competition among a plurality of players using a shoe having a predetermined number of standard decks of cards and at least one additional knockout card, each of the plurality of players having a total amount of money, and the method comprising the steps of: a) accepting an initial wager from each player for a first hand; b) dealing two cards to each player, the two cards being at least a portion of the respective player's hand; c) dealing two cards to a dealer, the two cards being at least a portion of the dealer hand, wherein one of the two dealer cards is face-up and a second of the two dealer cards is face-down; d) enabling each player to successively play his respective hand according to the conventional rules of blackjack; e) after each player has played his own hand, revealing the face-down card from the dealer hand and then completing the dealer hand according to the conventional rules of blackjack; f) based on results of steps d and e for each respective player, determining whether each player has won, lost, or tied, and then either collecting or paying out an appropriate amount of money based on each respective determination and based on each respective wager; g) accepting an initial wager from each respective player for a next hand; h) repeating each of steps b, c, d, e, and f for the next hand; and i) repeating each of steps g and h until all cards in the shoe have been dealt, wherein, when the at least one knockout card is dealt to any player or to the dealer, the knockout card is revealed to all players, the current hand is completed, a next hand is played to completion, and a player then having a least total amount of money is eliminated from the blackjack competition; and wherein, when a last knockout card is dealt, the method further includes the steps of: reshuffling all of the cards originally included in the shoe; playing five more hands as shown above in steps a, b, c, d, e, and f; and determining a winner and a second-place finisher based on the players' respective total amounts of money.