Tournaments
An exciting form of poker is tournaments, which continue to gain popularity on the
Internet and in the live poker world. Tournaments are growing within the States and
all over the world in places such as Europe, Russia, Costa Rica, and Australia. I
developed a lot of my no-limit skills playing tournaments in Costa Rica and have
been hooked ever since. I was fortunate enough to win the New Zealand
Poker Championship, which was an exciting break from my online endeavors.
Tournaments are fun and exciting and quite an adrenaline rush when you are able
to win a nice prize for just a small investment.
Of course, the biggest poker event of the year is the World Series of Poker held
every year in Las Vegas where the champion of the main event in 2007 took home
$2.5 million dollars! What was exciting about this year's winner, Chris Moneymaker,
is that lie won his 10K. entry by playing a $40 satellite tournament online and had
never played a live tournament before!
The scope of this book does not include tournament play. If you become a
profitable ring player, the strategies you use can help you become an effective
tournament player also; however, you will need to make many adjustments to your
ring game in tournaments to consistently end up in the money. Just be aware that if
you do play a lot of tournaments, there are several books that can help you on what
kind of adjustments you ought to make in your play.
One excellent site to practice tournaments is at PokerSchoolOnline.com. The owner
of PokerPages.com, a popular poker portal, runs this site. At Poker School Online,
you pay either a monthly or annual fee for use of the services. Play money
tournaments are run every single hour and the competition is quite good to hone
your skills. The school offers prizes each month to the better players who can use
the money to enter any live tournament they choose.
Practically every poker site now offers real money poker tournaments in some form.
Some only offer single table tournaments, while others offer multiple table
tournaments that could have as many as 500 or more players entered. Poker Stars
recently sponsored the largest tournament ever with over 2000 entrants! As of this
writing, by far the best multiple table tournament site is Poker Stars, which offers
many different games with buy-ins from $1 up to $215 and higher. Many sites also
offer the opportunity to participate in free tournaments or "freerolls." which are
offered as promotions on occasion to their frequent players. Take advantage of
these promotions to gain experience in this fun and exciting form of poker.
NEXT...
Collusion and Cheating
