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Poker Tournaments
Poker tournaments can offer some of the best deals in gambling entertainment. You can find poker tournaments for most of the popular poker games including Texas Hold'em, Omaha Poker, Stud Poker and more, including Limit, Pot Limit, and No Limit poker tournaments. Las Vegas and Atlantic City are two of the best places to find regular poker tournaments. Both the World Series of Poker championship and the World Poker Tour championship are hosted in Las Vegas. But online poker rooms also offer regular poker tournaments. You can get into a tournament for as little as $6, or you can play high stakes poker with buy-ins of $300 and more. You will find both single table tournaments as well as multiple table tournaments. Online poker tournaments have exploded since 2002. No-limit Texas Hold’em is by far the most popular tournament version. Currently, there are over 100,000 real-money players taking part in online poker tournaments every day.
Poker Tournament Play:
You can join a poker tournament simply by paying the buy-in and entry fee. Each player will start with an equal amount of chips. Limited re-buys are available at some land based poker tournaments but are not usual at online poker rooms. A player is eliminated when they lose all of their chips. A winner is declared when one player has won all of the chips. The prize pool is split between the top poker tournament finishers. For example, a poker tournament might pay the first place winner 50 per cent of the prize pool, the second place winner 30 per cent, and the third place winner 20 per cent. Large poker tournaments typically pay down a higher quantity of places. For example, the World Poker Tour championship at the Bellagio paid the top 50 players. Being the largest online poker room with a market share over 50 per cent, Party Poker offers the widest variety of poker tournaments. You can find daily single and multi-table tournaments with buy-ins ranging from $6 to $300 and more. Party Poker also holds weekly poker tournaments with prizes ranging from trips to Las Vegas to over $250,000 in prize money. Satellite tournaments offer an inexpensive way to see if you have the right stuff to play in the show. Win a satellite poker tournament and get your entry fee paid to the main event.
It might be a good idea to try several sites to find a structure you feel comfortable playing with. Some sites have 10-handed tables and some nine-handed. The amount of starting chips varies too. The sites with little starting chips are often focused on faster tournaments and the ones with much starting chips take more time. Major online poker rooms have the biggest tournament player volume, so if there are 500 or more entrants at tournaments and you prefer a starting field consisting of 100-200 players a smaller site can be the better choice. What also is worth thinking about is the level of competition. The sites with the toughest competition, like Pokerstars.com, can be a good training site while a site with many new or weak players is better for actually making money. There are differences between sites promotional programs. Look out for sites hosting major free-rolls and special bonus satellites for loyal customers - there's plenty of free cash out there.
Satellite tournaments:
A satellite tournament is one that offers entry into bigger tournaments as a prize. These can be online and live, and either single or multi-table, but the amount of satellite tournament winners qualifying for, and doing very well at events such as the World Series of Poker is increasing every year. A Shootout Satellite is a hybrid of the two standard satellite structures. The players are put into single table heats, with winners qualifying for the next round, until one table is left to determine the winner. As well as offering a potential route into big tournament, satellite tournaments can be good fun, and offer good overall value. Buy ins are generally relatively cheap.
Multi-table satellites:
These can consist of hundreds of entrants, with the buy-ins added up and split into entries.