How to Pick The Right Poker Tournament
March 27, 2009
If you are looking to start playing in poker tournaments, you will be faced with a wide variety of games to choose from. To make sure you don’t end up wasting your time playing in tournaments that do not meet your needs, you should decide exactly what you are looking for up front. Once you know what kind of tournament you are looking for, it should be easy to find a perfect fit.
Buying In
In a poker tournament, each player pays the same amount of money to get a seat in the game (the buy-in) and then a fee will be charged by the poker room to play. A fair fee is generally 10% of the buy-in. Because every player drops the same amount of money to get in the game, everyone starts with the same sized bankroll. When selecting a tournament, the buy-in might be the most important aspect for you to check. Obviously you don’t want to play above your means, but at the same time, if it’s particularly cheap to play, some of the players might act too recklessly and make your playing experience erratic.
Re-Buys
Some tournaments allow ‘re-buys’. A re-buy allows players who have lost all, or some, of their chips to pay their way back in to the game. The amount of chips you get with each re-buy, the total number of times each player can re-buy, and how far into the game you are allowed to re-buy are all factors that vary from game to game. If a tournament does not allow re-buys, it is called a ‘freeze out’ because once you lose your chips you are out of the game permanently.
A re-buy game is crazy compared to a freeze out game. As long as players know they can re-buy, they will play very aggressively and go all-in without hesitation. To compete against these players, you need to fight fire with fire. If you can’t stomach this outrageous playing style, you might mistakenly abandon your stronger hands faced with huge pots when you were actually against weaker, but more aggressive opponents.
Table Size
Most tournaments will start with nine or ten players at each table. As players get knocked out, the remaining players will be shuffled around to keep all of the tables as full as possible. More often now than in the past, we are seeing tournaments with tables that seat only six players (short-handed tournaments). Short-handed tournaments allow you to play some of the weaker hands because the particularly strong hands will appear less often for you and your opponents.
Blinds
The size of the small/big blinds will start relatively low compared to the size of your chip stack. For a standard game where each player begins with 1,500 chips, blinds usually start at 10/20 (small/big). As the game goes on, the blinds will increase on a regular basis, and the rate at which the blinds increase will determine the pace of the tournament. In an online game, the blinds typically increase every 10-15 minutes, while 20-30 minutes would be more appropriate for live poker tournaments. By the end of the game, the big blind should be about the same size as a single player’s starting chip stack. Generally, large blinds that increase often allow for faster play. If you are not aggressive enough to keep up with the ever-increasing blinds you may bleed too many chips to remain competitive.
Once you have learned about the different types of poker tournaments, you will be able to go through a whole list of different games and pick out the best ones for you. Carefully selecting your poker tournaments is important for every player, but if you are new to the game it can make the difference between winning big and going bust.