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Online Tournaments
Basic Premise
Tournaments are a fun, cheap way to learn the game of poker or maybe even win a big prize for a small investment of money. To enter a tournament, you must pay the registration fee. The fee is denoted by XX +Y, where XX of your money goes to the prize pool and Y is the house take for hosting the game. When you enter a tournament, whether it costs $10 or $100, you are given a set number of chips with which to play. Unless it’s a ‘rebuy’ tournament, (which is rare in online poker) you can not buy any more chips. If you lose all of your chips, you are out of the tournament. The winner of a tournament is the one who holds ALL of the chips at the tournament’s completion. The tournament winner is not the chip leader when time runs out; every other player in the tournament must have busted out for one person to be declared the victor. Thus, tournaments are not ‘timed’ like a football or basketball game. They are more like a boxing match with unlimited rounds where every opponent must be KO’d for someone to win.
Many people initially think, “Couldn’t a tournament go on forever if people just fold?” The answer is a resounding NO because the tournament blinds gradually increase. For every 15 minutes or 10 hands that elapse (this structure depends on the tournament), the blinds increase. The rising blinds are designed to speed up the tournament so people get knocked out bit by bit. You should aim to gradually increase your chips throughout the tournament before you end up being all in on your next big blind (which is very possible in the later rounds of the tournament).
Single-Table Tournaments
The first type of tournament is a single-table tournament. These tournaments run continuously and take about 45 minutes to complete. The size of this tournament is always one full, single table (10 players). They immediately begin once ten people sign up for the tournament.
The prize pool of this tournament will always be the buyin times 10. If you had to pay $20+2 to enter this tournament, the total prize pool would always be $200. First place does not get all of the money in single-table tournaments. The prize structure is always set where first place gets 50% of the buyins, second gets 30%, and third gets 20%. So if the tournament cost $20+2 to join, first place would get $100, second would get $60, third would get $40, and fourth through tenth would get nothing.
Any type of poker game can be played as a single-table tournament: no limit hold’em, limit hold’em, limit 7 stud, pot limit Omaha hi-lo, etc. No matter what type of poker game is played, the payouts/prize pool will always be the same (i.e. prize pool= 10 X buyin with 50% going to winner, 30% to second place, 20% to third).
Whenever playing these single-table tournaments, you should always aim to win first place. If you think about the payouts in terms of profit, there is a big difference between first place and the others. First place earns four buyins, second wins two, and third only makes one. Thus the profit of winning first is four times the profit of placing third.
However, if it is late in the tournament and you are low on chips, the tournament turns into a game of survival for you. While you should hope to win first, it is also tragic to get fourth. The difference between fourth/third and second/first are 20% of the buyins, so these are the main places with the most contention in the tournament.
When it is down to four people and people turn into survival mode, you should exploit this if you are the chip leader. People are going to be less likely to challenge you because they know you can bust them easily. Thus, bully people, steal their blinds, and set yourself up to win the whole thing.
Multi-Table Tournaments
When a tournament has over ten players, it is played over multiple tables. These ‘multi-table’ tournaments are also very popular, but take much longer and are scheduled in advance. Instead of just starting when 10 people enter a tournament, the poker room will schedule a multi-table tournament and begin it at the predetermined time with however number of people that signed up.
When the tournament starts, the software sits people down at as many number of tables that are necessary to fit everyone that registered for the tournament. As people get eliminated, the number of tables is reduced bit by bit until people reach the final table. For example, let’s say 90 people enter a multi-table tournament. The tournament would start with 9 full tables of ten people each. After about 20 minutes, 10 people are eliminated (spread over the different tables). The poker room will eliminate one of the tables and move those people from that table to all of the other tables (there would now be 8 full tables of ten people instead of 9 semi-full ones). In the above example, if the software decided to eliminate one of the tables with 9 people on it, those 9 people would fill in the gaps of the other tables.
The prize pools of multi-table tournaments vary. Again, the higher you place, the more money you will win. However, all of the money does not go to the top three places. The prize pool is divided among more finishers, generally at least the top 10% get money (the big prizes are skewed towards the top). For example, if 90 people entered the tournament, you would expect first to get 30%, second 24%, and third 16%, all the way down to 10th who would get 2%. To know for sure the payout structure of the tournament, check the poker room’s website.
While you may not realize this at first glance, the payout structure of multi-table tournaments really makes them feast or famine. For single table tournaments, 30% of the contestants get money, and there are only 10 buyins total. In the above example (with 90 people entering the multi-table tournament), only 11% of entrants got the money. Instead of first place winning 5 buyins (as he or she would in the single-table tournament), first place wins 30 buyins! Thus, if the tournament only cost $20+2 to enter, first place would walk away with $600!
These types of skewed payouts make these tournaments both fun and frustrating. There is a lot of luck involved with winning these types of tournaments. The winner of the most famous multi-table tournament, the championship NL Hold’em event at the WSOP, has to get very lucky to win.
Multi-table tournaments are very popular because you can win a lot of money for very little investment. While the expected value is not great (you will not win any money the vast majority of the time), you can often play three or more hours of poker for a small price.
All types of poker can be played in a multi-table tournament setting, though the hold’em events are always the most popular and bring in the most players.
Click here for the EmpirePoker tournaments schedule.
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