What are Guaranteed Tournaments?
by Jason Green of Predictem.com
When you play online poker you may come across information about guaranteed tournaments. But you may ask yourself, what the hell is a guaranteed tournament? A guaranteed online poker tournament is a tournament where the prize pool, money, is guaranteed by the online poker room where the tournament is being held. For example, if there is a $5,000 guaranteed poker tournament there will always be at least $5,000 in the prize pool.
If it turns out that there are not enough poker players in order to cover the prize pool for the tournament, then the poker room will end up paying the remainder of the guaranteed amount. If there are more than enough poker players that join the tournament, the player’s buy-in will then be added to the guaranteed amount. So if there is $1,000 more than the guaranteed $5,000 than the prize pool for that tournament will then be $6,000. The $5,000 that is guaranteed for the poker tournament simply means that there is the minimum amount of $5,000 that will be split between the players. However, if the guaranteed tournament is a very popular one, with a lot of players signing up to play, then there will be more money to split between the players.
Sometimes overlays happen. O.K. so what’s an overlay? An overlay is when the online poker room covers a part of the guaranteed amount of money for the tournament. Simply put, there is more money in the prize pool for the tournament than the players buy into. This makes online poker tournaments even more attractive for players as the more money that’s in the prize pool, the more money the players can win.
When you check out online guaranteed poker tournaments, try to find out what the real prize pool is and how many players are entered into the tournament. Often times though, you won’t know until the very end of registration as many come in at the last moment.
The more players that are in the tournament, the more money there will be, but it will make it that much harder to be in the money, as you will have more opponents and your odds become lesser.
