All About Tournaments:

The popularity of poker tournaments has increased over the past couple of years partly due to some popular televised high-profile, high stakes games. Poker tournaments are competitions played by up to 1500+ players all playing the same game at the same time. Poker tournaments provide inexpensive and fun ways for novice poker players to get experience playing poker. Tournaments are fun to play in, have low entry fees and offer large prize to be won, no wonder they are very popular.

Satellites and Super-Satellites:

A satellite game is a type of small poker tournament where the prize is an entry to a bigger tournament instead of cash. A super-satellite game is a larger version of the satellite game, a multi-table poker tournament where the top place winners win tournament entry into a larger tournament (as well as cash prizes in some tournaments).

Games Played

Wile many different types of poker games are available at casinos poker tournaments stick to basic poker games. Tournament poker games are usually limited to: Texas Hold'em, Omaha, 7-card Stud and 5-card Stud.

How to Play at a Poker Tournament:

While each tournament is slightly different some things don't change. In all tournaments:

The players are all given the same number of tournament chips to play with.
All players start tournament play at the same time.
The tournament level increases at regular intervals (sometimes a fixed time is given for each level of play and sometimes the playing level is increased after 10 rounds) and for every increase the ante and minimum bet double.
Players play until they run out of chips after which they retire. The last player playing ends up with all the chips and is declared the winner of the tournament.

After the winner is determined prize money is distributed according to the rules of the game. The very top players win the bulk of the prize money usually 1st place winners get about 40%, 2nd place winners get about 20% and 3rd place winners about 10%. The number of winners that share the prize depend on how many players entered as well as the game played. The amount of the prize money is set by; the number of players who register, the size of the buy-in fee and any additional money raised selling re-buys and add-ons.

Re-buys and Add-ons

Re-buys and Add-ons are sometimes offered to tournament players. Both allow players the option of purchasing additional chips during the tournament:

A re-buy option allows players to purchase more chips when they run out, limited to either the first few tournament levels or to a set time at the start of the tournament. The re-buy option is offered in one of two ways; unlimited re-buys or a single re-buy. In either case the option is limited to play during a re-buy period at the start of the tournament.

An add-on option is like a re-buy option but is offered only once at the end of the re-buy period, and can be exercised no matter how many chips the player has have.

All of the profits made from player re-buy and add-ons increase the size of the prize.

Tournament Betting

In tournaments the betting is structured and limits increase as tournament levels are increased (while tournaments differ lower betting limits are in the $15 range while the upper betting limits can be in the $2,000+ range). Changes to the tournament levels are handled differently in different tournaments some have a fixed time for each level of play while some increase the level of play after a set number of rounds have been played.

Poker tournaments can be a lot of fun and offer players a lot of playing-time for a reasonably low fee. Player losses are restricted to the size of the entry fee and even novice players have an outside shot at winning a big prize.