I've recently noticed a lot of "free blackjack tournament" or "free 3 card poker tournament"s springing up in East Coast casinos. From Atlantic City to Harrah's in Chester, PA, they're using this promo as an incentive to get bodies in the door.

I haven't played the 3 card poker ones yet, but from what I've seen of the blackjack, you enter for free, and you've got something like 20 hands to make as much out of the stack of chips that they give you(its been a few months since ive played one so i dont remember the hand specifics.)

IF you have any chips left over at the end, the record the amount of chips onto a leaderboard.
They basically just load up 7 people on a table, deal the hands, then move them on, so on and so forth.

Bally's WWW in AC has about 10 tables set up for their Friday Night Freebies. The tourny runs for a set about of time, usually like 6pm-10pm, and then at 10:30 the top X hands come back for the final round.

I haven't made it to the final round yet, so I dont know what that's all about, but they give out anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 to the winners from what i've seen!