Finding The Right Poker Tournament
Finding the right kind of tournament can be like finding a new suit. You want to find one that fits your style of play and bankroll the best. The three main things you want to look at first would be the buy in cost, the amount of players, and if there are re-buys or not. I myself try to avoid tournaments that offer re-buys, for some reason I just don’t like them. Then again some other players love being able to re-buy in a tournament again.
Other things you may want to think about when entering a tournament would be the amount of chips you start with and how fast the blinds go up. Usually its better to play in tournaments where the blinds go up slow and they give you more chips to start with. If the blinds move up to fast and you don’t start with very many chips you can be forced into playing worse hands just because the size of the blinds compared to your stack size.
If you never have player a tournament before I would suggest that you start with a freeroll tournament (discussed in the next chapter) or a tournament with a small buy in. A tournament with an entry fee of a buck or 2 would be fine. This way you can see how tournaments run and how the prize payouts work. By entering a low cost tournament you can learn a lot without risking very much at all.
After you get use to the workings of a poker tournament you will probably want to start playing in games with bigger buy-ins. Just be prepared for bigger swings in your bankroll playing in tournaments compared to ring games. For the most part only the top 10% of players in tournament will win any money, its possible to miss making it into the money for extended periods of time. If you have a set poker bankroll I wouldn’t play in a tournament that costs more than one 20th of your bankroll.
You should also pay attention to the amount of players in a tournament. Usually you have better odds of winning a good chunk of money when there are only 100 to 200 players. This is compared to a tournament that has 500 to 1000 entry’s or more! Also remember to check if the tournament has re-buys or not. If you play in a tournament with re-buys you should be willing to re-buy or 2 or 3 times, a lot of other players will do it and you need to keep the field even. When the tournament offers re-buys its kind of like playing in a tournament with more people because it takes longer to knock people out when they have to option to buy more chips.
After looking at all the factors mention above and trying out a few tournaments you should be able to find the kind of tourneys you like to play in. You may also want to look for tournaments that have guaranteed prize pools or added funds. These tournaments can offer better returns on your invested money. A situation when the prize pool is larger than the amount of entry fees is called positive expectation. This is something you should look for to get the most value for your tournament dollar.
Are people Using Special Poker Software Cheating?
New poker strategy software has come out in the poker world for use while playing online poker. The software actually plays "with" you and "watches" you and other players play. A lot of players agree that software like this can give players an "unfair" advantage but is it so "Unfair" that it’s cheating?
I took a look at 2 different strategy programs that run, and give advice, while you play poker online. On is called Texas Calculatem and the other, PokerOffice. On the Texas Calculatem website they say that the software "Gives advice on how you should play your hand given probabilities of you vs. your opponent" they also say that the software gives players "additional info, including odds of making certain hands, odds of one of your opponents making certain hands, # outs, pre-flop hand strength & Sklansky score"
It seems that the software, Texas Calculatem does give players and advantage, but is it "un-fair"? I sent an e-mail to 3 different "large" poker sites and asked them what they thought of the software. I was surprised to hear that none of them had any problems with the Texas Calculatem software. It seems that they don’t find that it gives players and "un-fair" advantage at all. Each poker site agreed that the software was, in fact, very fair.
The next strategy software on my list is PokerOffice. This software seems a bit more powerful. The makers of the software claim that “PokerOffice, tracks all of your opponents actions as well as your own game” This software seems to really get into your opponents head, It keeps track of how many hands your opponents play, how aggressive they play, and even how much money they win.
On the PokerOffice site it says the software can “Track every player you have ever played against and see how often they see the flop, raise pre-flop, check-raise, win at showdown, play bottom pair on the flop, and much more.”
The PokerOffice has to be crossing a line somewhere, its actually watching other peoples play, even getting into there “personal” business. Well to my surprise again after asking 3 “large” poker sites it seems that none of them believe this software to give any player an “un-fair” advantage. In fact it seems that the poker sites recommend that players use the software.
I guess the best thing to do is see it for yourself. Texas Calculatem has a demo of the software for people to see on their site. You can see it by Clicking Here.
PokerOffice offers a free trial to any poker player that wants one. You need to check out this software, it’s amazing. Get your FREE trial by clicking here!
Click here to come to the forum and talk about Poker Software.
See you next month,
Nathan
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