Online poker tournaments take many forms, even if they follow the same basic structure where players are each assigned the same amount of chips for their buy-in, assigned tables, and players are eliminated until a winner is determined. The basic poker tournament you’re likely to be most familiar with is called a “Freezeout,” in which the top places in the tournament win the large portion of the prize pool with about 10% of the total players winning some amount of cash.

 

 

A turbo tournament or speed tournament is an event in which blinds are raised much more rapidly than a normal tournament, sometimes as quickly as every two minutes. Turbo tournament differs significantly from a regular tournament. Being lucky is much more important in these sort of tournaments and aggressive play is what helps save many players. Staying too conservative means that you can lose your stack to blinds without even playing a hand properly!

Re-Buy Poker Tournaments are also known as Add-On tournaments and they’re growing more and more popular. This type of tournament allows players to re-buy into a tournament if they are close to being eliminated or if they bust out. In general, these tournaments only allow re-buying for a predetermined amount of time, after which it’s every man for himself with their stack of chips.

Satellite Tournaments are relatively inexpensive tournaments where the prize is a seat at a more expensive and prominent tournament. Many online poker sites host satellite tournaments for the WSOP and WPT as well as their own more expensive events.

Winner-Takes-All tournaments are relatively rare, but the action at them is fast and fierce, as the name says it all: coming in second is just like coming in twentieth. You don’t get paid! But if you do win, bigger and better rewards than a normal tournament await you.

A step tournament is basically a string of single-table tournaments in which the final winner moves up to the next step of the event. There’s an increasingly larger buy-in for each step and players can enter at every level. In these tournaments, you can sometimes win seats for a previous level or the same step, but this is becoming more uncommon as players have discovered they can end up being stuck on the same level forever.

Shootout tournaments are very similar to step tournaments, but you can not enter the event on any step other than the first one. A shootout tournament is a single, consecutive event with much stricter structure. In a step tournament you can play each of the steps whenever you want, whether it’s the same day or the same month. All the final table players usually receive substantial piece of the prize pool, with the two first places taking the larger portions.

If you’re interested in experiencing a tournament, consider getting some practice at the online poker room at a site like Sky Poker or Betfair Poker.