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5.11 Online Poker Tournaments
This course has been aimed at cash games, and this is the area you should get experienced in first before moving on to tournaments. This section is just a quick introduction to tournaments, the different types of tournament, and the differences in strategy you need to use in a tournament situation.
A Tournament Strategy guide is planned for The Poker Professor, similar in detail and style to this strategy course you have worked through. If you would like to be informed of when this course becomes available then please sign up to our newsletter or monitor our forums where we will make an announcement when it is available.
Types of Tournament
There are three main types of tournament:
Sit and Go Tournament
This is a kind of mini tournament. A Sit and Go tournament will usually have between 5 and 20 entrants at varying stake levels.
To enter a sit and go tournament all the entrants pay the stake money, so for a $5 sit and go tournament all entrants would pay $5 to enter the tournament (plus a small rake payable to the poker room).
This entrance fee then creates the prize pool, so if it was a 5 entrants - $5 sit and go then there would be a prize pool of $25. Payout structure varies but in general these tournaments will either pay the first 2 places or the first 3 places, so in this example the payout structure may be $17.50 to 1st place and $7.50 to 2nd place.
When the tournament begins each player will start with a stack of chips. Again this will vary, but most common will be a stack of 1000, 1500 or 2000 chips. When a player loses all his chips, then they are eliminated from the tournament.
The blinds will start off at a small level such as small blind 15, big blind 30 or similar. At regular intervals through the tournament the blind levels will increase in stages (25/50, 50/100, 100/200 etc). The period of the blind increase intervals will be based on either number of hands eg: every 15 hands, or a time interval eg: every 5 minutes.
You will also find a type of sit and go called a “Turbo”, this is just the same but the interval between the blind increased is shorter, so that the time taken to complete the tournament is shorter.
The tournament continues until one player has won all the chips, and all the other players have been eliminated.
Multi-Table Tournaments
The big multi-table tournaments can have any number of entrants, and usually range from a few hundred to a few thousand.
Due to the number of entrants the prize pool will also be a lot higher, and again will vary significantly from a few thousand dollars to $1million+. The number of places paid will also be higher and will typically range from the top 20 to the top 100 places depending on the number of entrants.
The format is similar to a sit and go tournament however a multi-table tournament will take a lot longer to complete and typically will take between 3 – 6 hours to complete.
During the tournament you may be moved from one table to another as players get eliminated, or you may get new players moved to the table you are playing at. Therefore you will be playing against different players at various stages in the tournament.
Satellite Tournaments
Satellite tournaments can take place in the form of a sit and go tournament or a multi-table tournament.
The only difference with a satellite tournament is that the prize is not a cash prize, but instead will be entrance to a bigger stake tournament.
For example a $5 stake Satellite tournament may offer the prize of free entrance into a $100 stake multi-table tournament.
Satellite tournaments are most common for the big stake tournaments with the big prizes. These tournaments may not be accessible to most players because the stake required to enter them is too high, so these satellite tournaments give these players the opportunity to get into these tournaments for a smaller stake.
Strategy differences Tournament vs Cash Games
There are significant differences in the strategy you need to adopt in a tournament to the strategy you have learnt in this course for cash games.
Here are just some of the variances:
- Starting hand requirement – you have to loosen your starting hand requirements as the blind levels increase.
- Reading Players – this is a harder task on multi-table tournaments as you are regularly playing against new people at your table, or being moved to another table full of new players, so you constantly have to re-assess new players in order to read them.
- Short handed tables – tables with less than 10 players require a different style of strategy with more frantic and aggressive plays such as bluffs
- Advanced Plays – as the blind levels increase more advanced plays such as Stealing the Blinds becomes increasingly important, and learning to defend against other players using these advanced plays is also very important.
By all means try a small stake sit and go or multi-table tournament to get an idea of what they are, but for now stick to the cash games, where you have learnt a very solid strategy in this course and if you have followed this course fully and practiced at every stage we have sent you to the tables, you should already be a better player than 95% of the players you will come across.
With time and experience you can increase that percentage to 98 -99% and even 100% if you are really ambitious and skilled.
Once you are ready to move on to incorporating Tournament play into your game, then check back here for our Tournament Strategy Course, and you can become a winning tournament player as well as a winning cash game player.
CONTINUE TO NEXT SECTION - 5.12 Challenge - Achieve our Goal of $1,000
