Types of online poker tournaments
It’s always good to know what you’re letting yourself in for when you sign up to play in online poker tournaments.
So for those of you who aren’t totally familiar with the various formats,here’s a quick run down of what you can expect from each of them:
Guaranteed Tournaments:
Generally speaking, these kind of tournaments will offer the largest jackpots. Poker Rooms will guarantee that a certain amount of money will be put into the prize pool, no matter how many players sign up to play. For example, every Sunday Pokerstars guarantee that there will be a million dollars up for grabs in the Sunday Million. Similarly Full Tilt run a guaranteed 750k tournament every Sunday which players can enter safe in the knowledge that there will always be $750,000 in the prize pool even if only a handfull of people enter.
Satellites:
Satellite tournaments allow players on small bank rolls to win seats in upcoming tournaments with a higher buy-in. For example, around the beginning of the summer it’s not unusual for most of the poker rooms to hold tournaments for a trip to the World Series of Poker in Vegas. These tournaments may well cost $150 to enter, which would be out of a lot of people’s price range.
However, rather than forget about winning the trip to Vegas all together, these people could enter a satellite tournament on the same site for around $1 where the winner would win a seat in the $150 game.
Satellites have become hugely popular over the years fuelled by the story of Chris Moneymaker who won his seat at the WSOP in 2003 via an online satellite costing him $39. He, of course, went on to take home the bracelet and made himself an instant millionaire.
Sit N Go’s:
Sit N Go’s (or SNG’s) are different to other kinds of poker tournaments in as far as they have no set start time. Instead, they rely on a set number of people signing up to play, and only when that number is reached will the game start.
Generally speaking, SNGs contain fewer players than traditional tournaments.
Bounty Tournaments:
These kind of games are relatively new to the poker tournament schedule. In Bounty Tournaments, a player’s buy-in is split in to two categories: Half is paid into the tournament prize pool where as the other half is used as a bounty on your head and will be paid to the player who knocks you out of the tournament (if you don’t go on and win it of course!).
For example, a $10 buy-in bounty tournament will pay players $5 for each opponent that they eliminate while the other $5 will go towards the normal prize pool.
Bounty Tournaments are a great way to build up your bank roll, as you don’t need to go all the way and win a tournament to make a profit.
Re-Buy Tournaments:
Also known as Add-ons, these are standard tournaments except for the fact that they allow players to buy back into the game once they’ve been knocked out. This is only allowed for a set period of time (usually the first hour of play) at which point eliminated players are asked to leave the table for good.
Players in re-buy tournaments usually end up playing for some huge amounts of cash due to the extra chips which have been spent during that first hour. They’re a great way of picking up some really good wins, especially if you can hang around for a while without needing to buy back in.