Poker Tournaments Overview

Thanks to massive media coverage poker tournaments, especially online poker tournament are one of the hottest things going round. Although poker was played for more than 150 years, poker tournaments are quite a new thing and online poker and online poker tournaments are even newer. The world famous World Series of Poker started with only 80k as the grand prize. This was because only eight players signed up and paid the 10k buy-in. 2003's winner, Chris Moneymaker has taken home 2.5 million dollars. In the 2003 WSOP tournament were 839 participants. That increased to 7.5 million dollars when Joseph Hachem took out the 2005 title.

Poker tournaments are way more exciting than regular ring games from numerous reasons. One of them is the fact that a tournament is a win-or-go-home situation. If you are out of chips you can not buy in again. This turns the money's value into a relative thing. In the first stages of the game your thousand dollars are much more valuable than the next thousands you are going to win. You should also avoid going all-in in the first rounds of the tournament as you have much more to lose than profit. But you have to act or risk being blinded out of the game.

In the late stages of the online poker tournament the increasing blinds are getting extremely high. Many players have to go all-in even before the flop. This means that your hole cards mean much more than in a regular game. Having a high pair or an Ace with a good kicker can be crucial to the game.

Poker tournaments require solid poker strategy and a great sense of the game. Unlike ring games a tournament professional can go 15 tournaments without winning even once and he will still be winning a fair bit of money and playing correctly. You need luck at a poker tournament. Just think - what are the chances that you will enter a poker room with a thousand dollars and leave it till the end of the night with two million dollars? Almost zero. Not easy but it can be done. For further advice have a look at this article on poker tournaments vs ring games.

Danny McGrath, Editorial Staff

2005-11-16

Share This...