Poker Tournaments

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Poker tournament is a special poker card game event. In contrast to a normal casino poker game, a poker tournament is continued until one of the players is determined as a winner. Most of the famous poker stars have won a famous poker tournament or main event or have at least reached the final table. In order to win a large tournament, outstanding poker skills are required. This does not conflict with the fact that some tournaments are won by players which were not known at the time. Many of the recent famous poker stars have started their carrier as online poker players.

Usually, a player pays a fixed buy-in to join the tournament; in return every player gets a fixed number of tournament chips. Therefore all players have the same starting points and the same chances. In this way, only the skills of each player determine the final winner. Some tournaments offer the option of purchasing more chips for players who are running with low stock size. In many tournaments, when players are leaving because they lost all their chips, the remaining players switch tables in order to keep the number of players per table more or less constant. A few tournaments are played in rounds, the winner of each round advances to the next round. The number of tables is reduced. In the end, the best players of the tournament are sitting at the final table to play for the tournament victory.

There are many kinds of tournaments starting from local tournaments with a small amount of poker players up to huge main events with thousands of participants including TV broadcast. Live TV broadcast is not possible because the hidden card camera which is necessary for a thrilling TV event would provide possibilities of cheating. Therefore, almost every tournament is broadcasted after the event. For some tournaments, the organizers give some players the opportunity to freeroll. This means that some players do not have to pay the buy-in, they are invited. Usually, freerolls are given to winners of smaller poker or online poker tournaments which are operated by sponsors or broadcast partners.

A very special kind of poker events are invitational tournaments. There is no buy-in for this kind of event, all players are handpicked by the organizers. Usually, many famous poker players or celebrities are invited, which leads to a higher number of sponsors.

A special kind is the sit-and-go tournament. This version has a fixed number of players for a table, the game starts when there are enough players at the table. Players have to sit and wait until the number is reached and the tournament starts.