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Classroom |
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Tournaments
- Introduction
WOW! What a growth in the popularity of poker! I think three things are responsible for that growth: online poker, televised tournaments, and satellites.
The first, online poker, allows players to play and improve their poker skills from anywhere in cyberspace. Televised poker tournaments, which now have lipstick cameras that allow viewers to see each player’s hole cards, allows the audience to feel like they are part of the action. The audience now knows when someone has a good hand … or when someone is bluffing.
One thing to remember when you are watching these televised tournaments is that what you are seeing is the last table in the tournament, the final table, where the limits are very high. And, because they are so high, it causes everyone to gamble very fast. You should know that if you could observe the play taking place in the earlier rounds of the tournament, players would be playing much tighter.
The third reason for the huge boom in poker is satellites, which are single or multi-table tournaments, where the winners receive an entry into larger buy-in tournaments. In other words, you win an entry into a large event, for a fraction of the cost of the regular buy-in.
Playing online is a great place to practice your tournament play for the large events now held on television. Playing online also allows you to play several tournaments in one day, or even two at the same time. Online, you usually play more than twice the amount of hands in the same period of time as in a live onland casino. Remember, the more experience you get, the better you will play.
The last two World Champions came to the World Series winning their way from a satellite they won on the Internet. This year’s winner received 5 million dollars. Next year, the estimated purse is 6 million. YIKES! Everyone at the final table will probably get at least a million. Won’t that be exciting? Well, if you decide to give it a try, you need to practice, and practice often.
You must download and install the software to practice in a tournament at Empire, then go to the lobby of Empirepoker and register for the event you want to play.
Just before the scheduled starting time of a tournament, all registered players are randomly put at different tables. For example, if the tournament has 100 entrants, there would be 10 tables with 10 players at each table. Everyone would start with $1000 in tournament chips. The limits go up every 15 minutes, with a 5-minute break after every four levels.
Because the limits keep getting higher and higher, some players have to eventually go broke. As players go busted, tables break up and those players remaining from the broken tables are moved to the other tables where vacancies are filled. This process continues until the tournament is down to one table.
After reaching the final table, the blinds continue going up and players keep breaking out until one player has won all the chips. The player ending up with all the chips is declared the winner of the tournament. The order of finish is decided by how the players go broke; the last one remaining gets the higher position. For instance, the last player getting knocked out by the first place winner finishes second, and the one getting knocked out before the second place player gets third, and so on, continuing all the way with players receiving placement in the order of elimination.
Unlike playing in a side game where you can start or quit the game anytime you want, in a tournament you finish when you either win all the chips, or go broke. If you were to quit before the tournament was actually over, you would forfeit.
Tournaments are a fun and inexpensive way to learn the game of poker, and 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 cannot buy 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. Again, you should aim to gradually increase your chips throughout the tournament before you end up being all in on your next big blind.
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