Online Poker Tournament Toolkit

by Bodog Poker | Sep 29 2009

If you've just started playing poker online, tournament action may be completely new to you. We've all seen the professional tournaments play out on television, but many poker players have never played in a tournament before. In areas that have no local casinos to host live tournaments poker players are forced to play strictly home-game action. Tournaments are a very different form of poker, with their own rules of play and strategy. It's advised to learn what you can about tournament action before you invest your money into one, and luckily Bodog makes that easy.

Bodog has all the information you need to know in order to play any tournament you want to try. Once you read the Bodog tournament rules that can be found at http://poker.bodog.ca/tournaments/tournament-rules.html you'll know how the events are organized and what the payouts will be to the top finishers. Once you understand how a tournament works, you can find lots of tournament strategy to read in the Bodog Beat article archives. Learn all that you can about playing tournaments and organize your bankroll for the action you plan on playing. You can even learn from the Bodog pros if you watch their training videos that cover different aspects of the game.

A good way to keep your tournament action organized is to have a tournament toolkit. Plan out the action you want to play from the tournament schedule, which you can find at http://poker.bodog.ca/tournaments/tournament-schedule.jsp. Find the action that works for the playing time you intend to use, and pick out events that won't bust your bankroll too quickly. You shouldn't play in a tournament that's more than 5% of your bankroll.

In your tournament toolkit you should also have a book for keeping results of your action. Document how you do in each event that you play so you can look at the information in the future. You may be able to find trends in your results that will allow you to concentrate your efforts on action that you tend to do well in. More importantly you'll be able to discover what type of action you should stay away from. The idea is to know how you are really doing and to discover leaks in your game you may be able to correct.

Once you start to get some results from your play you can accumulate points and find yourself on the Bodog tournament leaderboard. Players that finish at the top of the leaderboard each week, and each month, receive prizes. Most finishers get tournament credits that they can use to buy into other events. The top weekly winners play one of Bodog's professionals for $1000, while the monthly winners get free entry into the TLB (tournament leaderboard) final in January. In that tournament two of the 12 players will win a WSOP Main Event seat for the 2010 WSOP.

Looking for the thrill of a tournament? Try your luck at the Bodog 15 Days of Poker. There's lots of ways to get to the $15K Final and the promotion is a great way to test your knowledge of the different holdem tournament structures out there.