Best Poker Tournaments
We have ranked all leading online poker rooms based on the best poker tournament selection. Our poker tournament ranking is based on the number of tournament players during peak hours as well as the quality of sit-and-gos and fixed-schedule poker tournaments.
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Editors’ Picks – Best Tournament Poker Rooms
Poker Tournament News and Related Articles
About Poker Tournaments
Poker has become a world wide phenomenon over the recent years - everyone seems to play the game.
A great deal of today's poker fans became interested in the game thanks to tournaments. When TV networks started broadcasting popular poker tournaments like the WSOP they started receiving millions of viewers.
The allure of paying a small buy-in to potentially win thousands of dollars is hard to resist for most players.
If you want to win big money by playing cash games you have to play with high stakes. And if you play with high stakes you need a sizable bankroll.
The variance in cash games is huge and players who want to avoid that stress can play numerous smaller stakes tournaments.
If you don’t want to risk a fortune, poker tournaments are a good starting point.
It’s possible to even win a small satellite tournament online and go on to win the World Series of Poker Main Event – just ask Chris Moneymaker.
Above, our editors have listed the best online poker tournament sites. These top poker rooms offer a wide range of multi-table and sit-and-go tournaments.
Many of them also offer freerolls and satellites regularly and if you read our reviews you will be able to find the majority of tournament sites in the online poker industry.
Below is a guide to some of the most popular types of tournaments you’ll find online.
Multi-Table Tournaments (MTTs)
Multi-table tournaments are the standard in online poker.
As with all tournaments, you pay a buy-in fee and you get a stack of chips.
When those chips are gone you are out of the tournament (unless of course it's a rebuy tournament, in which case you can buy another stack of chips if you bust within a certain time period from the beginning).
MTTs, as you might assume, take place over multiple tables with a specified number of players per table and have a designated starting time.
When players start to bust out from the tournament and the number of players at a table becomes uneven to the rest of the field, that table is "broken" and players are randomly distributed to other tables with empty seats.
Sit & Go's (SNGs)
Sit & Go's were essentially pioneered online and are still incredibly popular.
A Sit & Go is usually only one or two tables and begins as soon as every seat is filled.
Payouts typically go to the top three players, depending on the number of tables.
On some of the bigger poker sites online, sit-and-gos start up so quickly it's almost difficult to select and open seat in time.
Shootout Tournaments
Shootouts are a combination of MTTs and Sit & Go's. The overall tournament will have a huge field, but you will only play at one table at a time until there is just one person left at each table.
The winner of each table will move on to the next round and the action will repeat until there is a winner.
The number of rounds depends on the field size but if you just keep winning each Sit & Go-style table, you’ll win the tournament.
Turbo Tournaments
Online poker already moves faster than live poker, but if you really want to crank up the action you might want to try a turbo tournament.
Turbo tournaments are just standard MTT or Sit & Go's where the blind levels increase quickly, making fast play and quick decisions a necessity.
Bounty Tournaments
Bounty tournaments are simply MTTs where there is a prize for knocking out a player.
Sometimes there are bounties placed on certain players, like celebrities and poker pros while in other tournaments you get a bounty every time you bust a player.
Satellite Tournaments
Satellite tournaments are just tournaments where the prize you're playing for is the buy-in to another bigger prize pool poer tournament.
Chris Moneymaker won his $10,000 seat into the 2003 WSOP Main Event through a $40 satellite, for example.
Weekly Guaranteed Tournaments
Almost every online poker site has a massive weekly poker tournament with a huge guaranteed prizepool.
Perhaps the most famous is the PokerStars Sunday Million, which originally offered a guaranteed prize pool of over $1 million but is now considerably bigger because of the amount of players it draws willing to put up the $200 buy-in.
If you’re willing to pay a fairly large buy-in, you could potentially win hundreds of thousands in these events.
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