QuickOverview

Hold'em tournaments are held in casinos and card rooms around the world, and are a great way for players to experience the game. Entrants pay a fixed amount to enter the tournament and get special tournament chips to play with. The entrants are seated at one or more tables by random assignment. If a player loses all of his chips, he is eliminated from the tournament. The tournament continues until one player has all the chips, and the top finishers are paid cash from the prize pool.

For example, 30 people enter a tournament, each paying a $55 entry fee. $50 goes to the prize pool, and $5 goes to the house (whoever is running the tournament). Each player gets 2,000 in tournament chips, and the blinds begin at 10/20. The hands are played exactly as they would in a normal cash game. However, every 30 minutes the blinds go up. So after 30 minutes, the blinds might be 20/40, and after an hour they might be 30/60. The increasing blinds forces players to accumulate chips. Otherwise, if the blinds never increased, the tournament might never end!

Successful tournament players will make sure they never get too low on chips. They know that if they wait for a very strong hand, they will likely lose all of their chips by posting the blinds. So they play aggressively when they feel they have the best hand, or if they believe their opponent(s) might fold a better hand.

Tournaments typically pay the top 10-25% of finishers. So in a 30-person tournament, the top 3 to 7 players would get a payout. The lowest payout is almost always larger than the entry fee. With a $1,500 prize pool, the winner might receive $650, with the other prize winners getting $325, $200, $150, $100 and $75, respectively.

The most popular tournaments in the world take place every year in Las Vegas. The World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a collection of about 60 poker tournaments, with buy-ins ranging from $500 to $50,000. The main event of the WSOP is the no-limit hold'em championship with a $10,000 buy-in. There are thousands of players that enter this event each year, and the winner is deemed the world champion for the year. Depending on the number of entrants, the first-place prize for this event can exceed $10 million!

For more information, please refer to Quick Overview's Texas Hold'em Poker article.

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