In This Chapter

Looking at poker tournament basics
Understanding blinds and betting structure
Avoiding mistakes made in tournaments
Discovering winning strategies
Cutting a deal at the final table
Discussing payaff structures
Finding information about tournaments

Why Plag Poker Toarnaments?

We can think of many reasons to play in poker tournaments, probably as many as there are players who enter them. Poker tournaments can be excit- ing, lucrative, and invaluable for gaining experience. What follows are rea- sons why you should consider entering tournaments.
v The thrill of victory

First of all, tournaments are fun. There's nothing like the thrill of competition that gets our competitive juices flowing. Sure it's nice to play in a cash game and walk away a winner at the end of the day. It's a terrific feeling to stuff the pockets of your jeans with your winnings, and to live - even for a moment - that famous line from Walter Tevis's The Color o f Money. "Money won," Paul Newman's character Fast Eddie says as he reveals an ageless truth to Tom Cruise, "is twice as sweet as money earned."

Learn neu games inexpensively

Aside and apart from the competition and the fun factor, tournaments are a terrific way to learn new games. Here's why: The game you want to learn might not be offered at betting limits that are comfortable for you. In fact, in smaller casinos, the game might not be available at all. Without tournaments, how can you ever learn to play Omaha18, or Razz, or Seven-Stud18 in a card casino that has enough room for only a few Hold'em and Stud tables? If you enter low-buy-in tourneys, you can get plenty of play for a limited amount of money. You might get to play two or three hours of Razz for a $25 buy-in. That's not enough time to let you master the game, but it will be suffi- cient to help you decide if you enjoy it, and whether you have a feel for the game. (For details about buy-ins, see the section called "Buy-ins and fees" in this chapter.)
Tournaments can be a powerful learning tool because your investment is lim- ited to the cost of the buy-in; and without mounting losses to worry about, you can devote your time to becoming more knowledgeable and more profi- cient at a new game.

The game is "pure"

Not only are your costs fixed when you enter a tournament, the game is invariably a bit more pure and uncluttered than cash games. More of your opponents are prone to play by the book in tournaments because they realize that once they lose their buy-in, it's finis - at least as far as that event is con- cerned. Tournament players follow the rules closely, s o it's a bit easier for new players to see how theory works in practice. In a cash game, by compari- son, the proper way to do things frequently get skewed by someone with an unlimited bankroll and a hankerin' to gamble.

Take on the champs

Finally, tournaments are a way to match your skills with some of the best play- ers in the world. You're probably not going to see worldclass players - the kind you've read about in Card Player or Poker Digest magazines - entering a $25 buy-in tournament in a small riverboat casino in Middle America, but you certainly will find players of this ilk entered in $100 buy-in tournaments in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Connecticut, Mississippi, and California.
Nothing does as much for the confidence of a beginner than sitting at the same table with a big-name opponent and finding out that that player also faces the same challenges that you do.
Hey, you might even get lucky, catch a card and knock one of these big names out of the event. Then you can point to his picture in one of the magazines and say to all your friends, "He wasn't s o tough. Why, I eliminated him when my set filled up on the river and just destroyed that pathetic flush of his!"
Poker Tournament Basics

Tournaments come in all types and sizes. They can consist of Hold'em, Seven- Card Stud, Lowball, Omaha, or other games. Here, we give you the basics regarding cost, betting structures, and the prize pool.
buy-ins and fees
To participate in a tournament, you need to pay an entry fee called a buy-in. The entry fee buys you a seat in the tournament, where each player receives the same number of chips to begin with. The fee can range from a small amount ($100 is common) to a large amount ($10,000 for the World Championship). Some tournaments are structured so that once you have lost the chips in front of you, you are out of the tournament. Others are rebuy tournaments, where you can buy more chips (after your initial buy-in) during a designated period of time - usually during the first hour or two of play, or during the first few betting limits.

Betting structures

In typical tournaments, the betting structure starts out with limits of $15430 or $25450. Betting limits then increase regularly, either every 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or hourly. The betting increase is often double the bet from the prior round.

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