All About Tournaments
Tournaments are structured poker competitions in which players play against each other. Unlike regular poker games where players can quit the game and cash their chips anytime they like to, in tournaments the game continues until there's a winner.
You might run into different types of tournament, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and different players prefer different types of tournaments, here are the most common types that you might run into:
Sit and go tournament- In this table tournament there are usually 6-10 players and they are the most fast tournaments.
Freeroll- Freeroll means that there's no entry fee to the tournament so that everyone can join in the game if he enters or registers in time. Those tournaments are usually multiple tabled tournaments.
Guaranteed- Guaranteed tournaments are tournaments in which the prize is guaranteed to be a specific and pre-decided amount of money. These are the biggest tournaments and they usually have lots of players competing against each other.
Tournaments usually end with one winner, but sometimes with a mutual consensus of the remaining players. In this case the prize is split between the players according to their proportional in-game currency.
There are two ways to award the players:
- Fixed- Each placing in the tournaments corresponds to a certain pre-decided sum or payoff.
- Proportional- In this way, the payouts corresponds to a percentage-based scale. This scale is determined based on the number of players in the game and are usually top-heavy i.e. the top three players win bigger sums that the rest.
The major tournaments in the world of poker are usually multi-tabled. Multi-table tournaments involve many players playing simultaneously against each other. Some of the most prestigious and respected poker tournaments include the WSOP (World Series of Poker), the WPT (World Poker Tour), the Professional Poker Tour and the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament.