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Tournaments are a great way to play poker, they are competitive and fun. There’s always a fixed amount of money so every player knows exactly how much they will loose, except in re-buy tournaments where there is unlimited re-buys. For a small investment any player can win a big pile of money, since the prize for a first place can be very high compared to how much a player has risked and you don’t have to be an expert player to win a tournament. Anyone can win a tournament as Chris Moneymaker who never had played a live tournament before entering the WSOP, proved in 2003.
A great way to practice and improve the poker tournament skills is to play online, there are an immense number of tournaments running twenty four hours a day and seven days of the week. An ambitious player can easily play what would have been 10 years of live tournament practice in one year, so there’s no doubt about online poker being a great and helpful tool for improving ones skills. A player also gets to practice against players from around the world and therefore against many different styles of play, which leads to a much larger variety of weapons in the arsenal. There are all kinds of possible structures and buy-ins, however, the most popular form of poker is without a doubt No Limit Texas Hold’em.
The poker room or casino takes out an entry fee from all players entering the tournament. If the buy-in is $100 the house might take an extra $10, which means that the actual amount paid by the player is $110. If there are 100 players, the total prize pool will be 100 x $100 = $10,000. The pay out structure depends on the tournament, but usually there is a prize for approximately every ten players. In this case, it might be 30% for first place followed by 20%, 13%, 10%, 7%, 6%, 5%, 4%, 3%, and 2% respectively, thus making it ten prizes in total.
All players start out with an equal amount of chips and, as the tournament progresses, the stakes are typically raised every 15-60 minutes. The amount of chips players begin with, the stakes and the time periods determine whether it is a fast or slow tournament. Good players generally prefer slow tournaments where you start out with a lot of chips (as compared to the stakes) and where the time periods are long. This structure gives the better player a greater opportunity of outplaying their opponents before the stakes become so high that they are forced to "gamble" too much.
If there are 100 players in the tournament they will usually start by playing ten handed at ten tables. As players go broke they are eliminated (unless it is a re-buy tournament, where a player has the option of buying in again during a specified time period). Once players are eliminated, other players are relocated as tables are broken-up and re-configured. For example, if there are ten players on one table and seven players on two other tables, two players from the ten-handed table may move to the seven-handed tables, thus making all three tables eight-handed. The tournament ends when one player has all the chips.
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