Online Poker Tournaments

Online poker tournaments are a great way to increase your bankroll without worrying about going broke in the process (as long as you’re not playing in a re-buy or add-on tournament, the only money you’re committing is the buy-in, so you don’t risk gambling all of your money away). They’re also an excellent way to practice in preparation for playing in a live tournament since you can play in many tournaments and gain a lot of experience. That’s how Chris Moneymaker became a strong enough player to win the 2003 World Series of Poker (WSOP). He logged many hours playing at PokerStars.com, the biggest online poker site in the world and they host many satellite tournaments to win a seat at the WSOP.

Many people prefer playing in online poker tournaments than in cash/ring games because they can be more exciting since people don’t want to get knocked out. In ring games, people come and go and you can keep buying more chips, so there isn’t the same urgency that there is in a tournament. Even though there’s more action, many people find playing in online poker tournaments to be relaxing and a nice way to wind down the day. You can pour yourself a nice glass of wine, turn on the TV and play in a tournament or two while you chill out in the comfort of your own home. Also, you don’t have to finish first to win money and make a decent return on your initial investment (the buy-in).

So where to begin? First, sign up at an online poker site if you haven’t already. PokerStars.com, UltimateBet.com and AbsolutePoker.com are three highly recommended and safe sites to play poker, and they’ve got an excellent array of tournaments for you to choose from. PokerStars.com has one of the best - if not the best - tournament online cardrooms and they’re so busy you’ll never have to wait more than a minute for a Sit & Go tournament to start (usually they take only a few seconds to fill up). UltimateBet.com’s tournaments were given a complete overhaul by professional poker player Annie Duke a few years ago and the results are amazing! The poker rooms have a great look and the flow of the game is really enjoyable to play.

After signing up, log into your account and you’ll get the site’s main lobby, which looks like this (we’ll use PokerStars.com for our examples):

From the lobby, you click on the tab for the kind of game you want to play: tournament or ring games, and which type of tournaments (such as satellite or Sit & Go); real or play money; low or high stakes; Limit, Pot-Limit or No-Limit; how many players per table; and which poker variant you like, such as Texas Holdem, Omaha, and so on. There are so many games to choose from, so PokerStars.com has a filter you can use to limit the choices to just what you’re interested in playing. The filter looks like this:

Each game type (ring games, Sit & Go, satellites, etc...) has its own filter; this example is for Sit & Go tournaments. The filter’s in the lower-left corner of the lobby. If you click on the main part of the box (it says ‘Sit & Go Filter...’), you can turn the filter on or off. When it’s on, there’s a green bar, and when it’s off, the green bar is black. To access the filter box, click on the arrow-down button to the right of the filter box. That will bring up the filter window that you see above. Click on the ‘x’ to close it after you’ve made your selections.

The person here has clicked on only “Hold’em” for the game type since they don’t want to bother playing in any other type of game, so when they look at the lobby, they’ll only see games that are playing Texas Holdem. They’ve also clicked on every box for the players per table, limit and buy-in cash-type. When you’re new to poker, only click on the play money box. When you get better, only then should you play with real money.

After you’ve set up the game parameters, from the main lobby, click on a tournament that you want to play and hit enter, or double-click on it. If you double-click on it, you’ll automatically get a registration window that pops up that says how much the buy-in is, how much you have available in your account, and to confirm that you want to play in that tournament. If you do, click ‘ok’ and you’ll be taken to the individual game’s lobby.

If you click on the tournament and hit enter (instead of double-clicking), it will bring up the window for that particular game’s lobby. (So there are two lobbies: the main big one that displays all games available, and an individual lobby for each game.) From the individual game lobby, it shows what the buy-in is, how the prize money is distributed, details about the game (such as limit, poker variant and the stakes), and who’s registered so far. Once the tournament starts, it shows the stack size of the players and lists what order they finished in.

If MizVino hadn’t already registered by double-clicking and saying ‘ok’ to play, there would be a green button that says ‘register’ in the tournament lobby, so she can register that way as well. You can see how, because she’s registered already, the button now says ‘unregister.’ If something comes up and you no longer want to play in the tournament, it’s nice to know you’re not obligated to play and that you can unregister from it (provided the game hasn’t started yet - games fill very quickly at PokerStars.com).

After the last player has registered, a new window will pop up that has the table where you’re going to play the tournament. They give you a one-minute warning that the game is going to start. You can see MizVino is seated in the lower-right seat; this is her favourite seat and she has her account set up so that every time she plays in a tournament - even when she’s moved to a different table - she always gets that seat. To set this up, go to the main tournament lobby and click on ‘Options,’ then ‘Preferred Seat,’ and then, for each number of players per table, choose your favourite seat and click ‘ok’ when you’re done.

In the next photo, you can see that the tournament has started and that this is the first hand. The action is at MizVino, and because she hasn’t pre-selected what she wants to do, big buttons come up with the options available to her. She can fold, call $20 to stay in the game and see the flop, raise to $40 or she can raise to an even higher amount. She can type in the box above the raise button the amount she’d like to raise by, or she can use the slider and pull the arrow over to the right until the amount she wants to raise is shown. What’s handy about the slider is that if you drag it over to the far-right as far as it will go, it will show you the maximum amount that you’re able to bet. This is handy for new players who aren’t totally sure what the maximum is that they can bet.

You can also see that one of the players has left two comments in Spanish in the chat box (they’re written in blue). PokerStars.com has software available in many languages (English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish), but, currently, they only allow for English to be spoken in the chat box (if you hover over the chat box, a message comes up reminding people to only use English). Now, this player who chatted in Spanish is just saying “good evening” and asking how to win a ticket to a freeroll tournament, but to keep the game fair and to prevent collusion (a type of team-cheating), every game everywhere in the world both online and live have a strict rule that only one particular language can be spoken at the table. If a player continues to chat in a language not approved for that table, another player could complain to the dealer and the player chatting in the wrong language could get their chatting privileges taken away. Due to poker’s worldwide popularity, and because not everyone speaks English, there are now non-English poker sites where people can play and chat in their own language (although the top poker sites should consider adding tables where chat is permitted in other languages - especially in the languages that they translated their software into).

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