How Online Poker Tournaments Work

Online poker tournaments without a doubt offer more benefits than playing live poker tournaments. The entry fee for online tournaments is much lower than live tournaments, because there is low overheads for the poker rooms to host a tournament online. Not only can you play in smaller buy-in tournaments, but you will play more hands per hour because the hands are dealt faster. You can finish the tournament in less time, collect your prize money and get on with your day. Online poker sites offer greater game selection, buy-ins for tournaments range from one dollar to hundreds of dollars for a single tournament. No brick and mortar casino could ever afford to run a $1 buy-in tournament to give you experience, but online poker rooms will do this to attract players to their bigger games.

When you enter a tournament, the buy-in is typically listed in the form of buy-in plus rake. For example, if a tournament which you can register in is listed as $10+$1, this means the tournament buy-in is $10 and $1 is the rake for the poker room. The rake is how the poker room makes its money. The rest of the money is allocated to the prize pool for the players.

There are two types of poker tournaments which you can play online. The first type is sit-and-go tournaments (SNGs). Typically they are one table tournaments but sit and goes with more the one table are becoming more common. The standard sit and go tournaments feature 10 players with each player starting with the same number of chips (on most sites it will be 1500 chips). Generally the blind structure will start at a low level in comparison to chip stacks, and will increase at fixed time intervals. The sit’n'go will continue to run until one player has all the chips and is declared the winner. The typical payout structure for sit and go tournaments is 50% of the total prize pool for first place, 30% for second place and 20% for third place. If you are a good SNG player, you have a good chance of placing in the money the majority of the time as there is only a small player pool you have to beat.

The second type of online poker tournaments you can play in are multi-table tournaments (MTTs). In this format, the poker room creates one tournament table for each 10 entrants. As players are eliminated, the tables are reduced until there are only enough players to fill the final table. For example, if it’s a 500 player tournament, there will be 50 tables. After 10 players are eliminated, the server will consolidate the 490 remaining players into 49 tables, and every time ten more players are eliminated, one more table is eliminated and the remaining players are consolidated. Like is the case in sit and go tournaments, the blinds will increase at fixed intervals, usually every 10 or 15 minutes.

The online poker room will pay out a certain percentage of the top finishers. Typically they pay the top 10% of all players, so if it was a multi-table tournament with 100 players who enter, the top 10 players will be paid. The payout structures all typically grant considerable favor to those that make it to the final table, so remember that your goal is always run deep in the tournament to have a chance to win the big prizes. MTT’s tend to attract many players because even though you will not make the money for the most part, when you do cash you will earn a substantial amount of money, and if you run really good you have a chance to make a big payout on only a small buy-in.

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