Whats a Satellite Poker Tournament?
When you look at the Tournament List in all of the popular
poker rooms, you'll see many different poker tournaments
advertised including some which are termed "Satellite
Tournaments."
A brief explanation of these Satellite Tournaments follows
for those new to the online poker scene.
The poker rooms want to run large tournaments offering
thousands or dollars, pounds or euros to attract new players
and also to get the larger players playing on their regular
tables where they get a cut of the rake. It also makes their
advertising so much more attractive if they can say that
a tournament they are running has a prize pot of $250,000.
Well, we can all see the attraction there can't we.
However, entering a game of poker where the winner is going
to walk away with a life-changing sum of money is expensive
and the costs to buy in can be out of reach of the regular
guy, or gal (we're not sexist here) wanting to play poker.
Even the better than average players, generally, can afford
or just don't want to pay such a large amount to play in
a poker tournament.
This is where Satellite Poker Tournaments come in.
To generate enough players and also to give the smaller
players a chance at the big money, smaller tournaments lead
up to the final poker game.
The winners (normally 1 for every 20 players in the Satellite,
although this varies) will win their entry fee into the
next round of the competition or the finals. Often there
will be two or three satellite rounds before the final so
you can win your place for little money - if your good enough!
I've listed an example of a tournament with 2 satellite
poker tournaments to qualify below :
Satellite Round 1 - $10 Buy In - Winner gets paid
into Satellite Round 2 which would normally cost $200
Satellite Round 2 - Winner gets their entry into
the Final Round normally a direct buy-in to the final poker
game would cost $1000
Final Round - The Winner wins a percentage of the
Prize Pot, in this case the prize pot may be around $100,000.
The winners percentage is normally between 30 and 40% depending
on the amount of players and the tournament set-up.
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