With the explosion of interest in poker over the last few years, there has been a proliferation of poker tournaments. Many can even be watched on TV in the comfort of your own home.
Online, the number and type of tournaments available is huge and probably growing. They range from simple cash games, more popularly known as sit and go tournaments, to major events.
Sit and go tournaments have fewer people involved at any one time, usually nine to 10 participants. As soon as the seats are filled, the game begins. Larger events are multi-player, very often seating thousands at a time. These start playing at scheduled times.
Between these two extremes are what is called multi table sit and go tournaments. Like the basic sit and go, play starts when all players are seated, but the numbers playing range from eight to 180.
Most poker tournaments are played as ‘freeze outs’ which means that once you have lost your chips you are frozen out of the game. However, some tournaments allow you to buy more chips early on in the game just in case. There is usually a time limit; once this is reached the match continues as a freeze out.
While gambling addiction can be a problem, most online poker tournaments have seemingly responded to this problem by limiting the amount you pay as a buy in. While this is useful in controlling spending, it does have a downside – you will have to play a lot of tournaments to win a large amount of money.
June 6th, 2010 at 8:17 am
What a great resource!