Author: horse-racing-free-tips

A poker tournament is a game where the winnings are used as points, where the players play by specific rules and one, two or three player get to actually win money in the end. The number of winners and the rules are specific to every tournament and they are made public before the enrolment for the tournament begins.

Every one who wants to enter the tournament pays a fee, the same amount of money that is to be used as the bankroll of every player for that specific tournament, and it is called the buy-in .Next to the buy in the casino, online or offline, will take itself a fee from all players called the entrance fee, fee used to sustain and entertain the tournament. Let’s say the buy-in is $300, and then the casino might take an extra $30, so in order to enter that tournament you will have to give the house a total amount of $330. All the money gathered fro the buy-ins is collected for the prize fund and it will be the buy-in multiplied by the number of players. If in our example if it is a tournament with 200 players, then the total prize will be of $60.000. Players can be paid for their games only after the tournament is over and only if they qualify among the top players. Usually there is a price for every top 10 player, but this depends on the casino and tournament too. The prices are announced before and they are calculated as percepts from the price pool gathered. For example 40% first price, 30% second, 10% third, 8% fourth, 7% fifth and 5% sixth for a tournament in which the top 6 players receive prices.

In a tournament all players start out with the same amount of chips. It is usually played at different tables, splitting up the players equally and from that on every player will leave the tournament as soon as he or she goes broke. A tournament can be fast or slow, depending on the skill and chips amount the players start with. Professional players prefer tournaments that are slow so they have time to weight their decisions, to observe their opponents and to play a while before growing that enormous stack that will make them gamble too much. Poker tournaments are played until one player collects all the chips that were in the game.

To be first depends not only on your poker skill, but on your luck also. To be in the first ten is a clear statement that you definitely are a threat for any poker player of that level.

Sometimes in tournaments there come times when a special situation arises. One of these situations that a player can encounter during a poker tournament is known under the name of “The gap concept”.

The terminology of gap concept was first pioneered by an extraordinary poker writer named David Skylansky. This basically means that when you are playing poker you can find yourself in the situation when you just need a hand that is better than the one you are holding in order to play against another player. The opponent would have to open the betting and to play against him your hand has to be better than his hand you would have needed to open the betting yourself. That difference between you actual hand and the hand you would have needed in this case, to call his bet, is the difference that defines the gap concept.

This particular difference varies a lot during poker tournaments. It is defined mostly by the poker playing style of your opponents, whether it is tight or loose. The gap is smaller when others play loose poker and it growth bigger and bigger as they get tighter. This happens mostly because a tight player will not take so many chances but he will also hold on to his hand once he has a good one.

Let’s say you are first in and you hold a hand that doesn’t necessarily pushes you to bet. But another player bets or raises and you have to call or raise his or hers bet in order to prove the power of your hand or just to stay in the game and be able to play it the way you intended in the first place. The gap concept is not always a bad situation. Players can take advantage of this gap and turn the odds around. If your first choice was to semi-bluff, the gap concept gives the opportunity to do so without thinking about it. If you call a bet with a hand you wouldn’t normally do that, it doesn’t mean you will lose the round. It gives you and opportunity to enter further bidding rounds that you normally wouldn’t have entered and it also make you hope and maybe hit a draw with the help of additional cards dealt.

On the other hand, if you are positioned in late position when you play Texas hold’em and you have quite a few chips on your stack, then you can raise and call with lower hands. If you have hands like a small pair or Ace plus another unimportant card you can call a bet without many risks, but be aware of the aggressiveness of players in first position and blinds because if they are very aggressive and call or raise you back a lot of times then you can waste a lot of your stack for a hand that just isn’t worth it.