Winning a Poker Tournament

Poker is one of the world's hottest fads. The Players start with a standard amount of chips, the blinds gradually escalate, and players are gradually eliminated. The prize pool of these tournaments is heavily weighted to the top finishers, but about 10% of the entrants place in the money. These tournaments are generally played as freeze outs, meaning that once a player lose all of his chips, he is not allowed back into the tournament. While poker has been regularly played for over 100 years, the tournament track is still a comparatively new thing. In 2005, Joseph Hachem took home $7.5 million. The reason for this extreme increase in prize money is the number of players that have entered tournaments. In 1972, only 8 players entered the world series of poker, while 839 entered in the year 2003. Television has made tournament poker look alluring- a rivalry where skill triumphs. However, the truth of the matter is that luck plays a much larger factor in tournaments than ring games.

However, to win a tournament where each player has 2,000 starting chips and 1,000 people to enter, you would require winning two million in chips to win the tournament. This is not an easy achievement to do unless lady luck truly is there with you!

Ring Games vis-à-vis Tournaments

You should try your hand at ring games rather than tournaments due to following reasons:

• You can constantly win at a ring game, whereas a tournament is devour or dearth.
• Luck does not have much role in having a winning session at a ring game as compared to a tournament.
• Playing tournaments are much more fun than playing ring games sometimes, as the former involves making more money.