JV'S POKER ROOM

BY: John Vorhaus

If you're interested in playing poker in casinos, but you're still a little leery of putting big money down in a game you don't know very well, there's a low-cost alternative that will give you a great deal of real-life poker experience for as little as $20... maybe even less! When it comes to getting a tremendous amount of bang for your gambling buck, nothing comes close to poker tournaments. Nothing.

Here's how it works. Each participant puts up a certain amount of money. This amount can range from the aforementioned $20 at the bottom end all the way up to $10,000 at the main event of the World Series of Poker. The number of participants can likewise range from as few as ten at a one-table shootout to as many as four or five hundred. Can you imagine five hundred people putting up ten grand each to compete? That would be $5,000,000 to the winner. Talk about your paydays!

Most tournaments, however, are not winner-take-all. Usually the top ten finishers receive a payout, with the bulk of the prize pool going to the top three spots. In larger tournaments, as many as 20 or 30 people get paid. In the smallest competitions it's only two or three. And not all of the entry fees go into the prize pool. The house keeps a certain percentage to cover its expenses, to pay its dealers, etc.

Sometimes, though, you'll find a tournament where there's no entry fee and no house cut. This type of tournament, called a freeroll, is hosted by a casino that wishes to build traffic to its card room. Their logic (and it's quite sound, really) is that people who come to play in the tournament will stay to play in live games. In this way, the house will recoup the money that it puts into a freeroll prize pool from subsequent live action. So be on the lookout for those freerolls!

But even if you have to pay a modest amount to enter a tournament, it's money well spent, especially if you're just learning how to play card room poker. For the cost of, say, a double sawbuck, you get the opportunity to compete for hours and hours in a real live poker game. And don't forget that you might finish in the money, or even win the tournament outright!

Each tournament entrant is given a fixed amount of tournament chips. For instance, you might receive $200 worth of tournament chips ($T200) for the cost of your $20 buy-in. These chips now have no value outside the tournament setting. You can't cash out any time you like. You have to (get to!) stay and play until you've lost your buy-in, or played your way through to the winner's circle.

Let's say you're playing in a Texas hold 'em tournament where your $20 buy-in gets you $T200 in tournament chips. Play starts at the $T10-20 level with blinds of $T5 and $T10. For the first twenty minutes or half an hour, the betting limits stay at this level. But then, at the end of that round, the limits go up! This is the key to understanding tournament structure. Every twenty minutes or half hour, the limits increase, so that your $T200, which seems like a generous amount at the $T10-20 level, starts to look paltry when the limits climb to, say $T50-100 or $T100-200.

To win a poker tournament, then, you have to keep accumulating more and more chips, just to stay ahead of the limit increases. In this sense, your goal is just like it is in any poker game: to outplay your opponents and win your fair share of pots. But the structure of most poker tournaments is such that, with reasonably tight-aggressive play, you can get yourself several hours of play for your tournament buy-in, even if you don't catch cards.

And that's why poker tournaments are such a good investment for poker beginners. For a small, fixed, investment, you get hours of experience in a no-nonsense poker setting, plus the aforementioned possibility of actually winning the thing.

And in some tournaments, even if you run out of chips, you're not necessarily out of the running. These tournaments are called rebuy tournaments, and they give you the option of buying more chips whenever you fall below a certain number of chips, or if you go broke altogether. In the example above, a tournament which starts with $T200, if it's a rebuy tournament, you can buy more chips any time your stack fall below $T200 - at least for the first hour of play. After that first hour, the rebuy period ends, and from that point forward, if you go broke you're out of the tournament for good. That's when the fun begins!

And believe me, there's nothing more fun than putting one of your opponents into a pot for all his chips, beating him, and busting him out of the tournament. Some tournaments, called bounty tournaments, even give you a cash prize for sending an opponent to the rail.

If you've never played live card room poker, or even if you have but you just want to try something new or hone your poker skills, you really should give poker tournaments a whirl. For the smallest of investments, you have a chance to play a lot, learn a lot, and maybe even grab some genuine poker glory.

So stop by your local casino's poker room, pick up a tournament schedule and a structure sheet (which tells about betting limits, prize structure, tournament rules and more) and give yourself a chance to win. You'll have the time of your life.

Next time: basic poker tournament strategy.