Poker Tournament Strategy | High Buy In vs. Low Buy In

Poker Tournament Strategy - High Buy In vs. Low Buy In

The main event of the World Series of Poker is probably the most exciting poker tournament in the world. With a buy-in of $10,000, it’s also among the most expensive. As 2006 WSOP champion Jamie Gold, who collected 12 million dollars for his performance, will probably tell you, it can definitely be worth the investment. Not all of us can afford to make such an investment though, and for the rest of us, there are a wide variety of tournament buy-ins, from a single dollar for some online poker events, to $100, $200, $1000, $1500, $5000 and everything in between. A number of factors will help you determine whether it is the high buy in event or the lower buy in event that is right for you. Playing in a freeroll might be an alternative, but those tournaments are often very loose and wild and not very much like “normal poker”.

Bankroll Size

Poker is a game of short term luck, and the larger your bankroll relative to the tournament buy-ins, the more variance you will be able to weather. If you’ve only got a $30,000 bankroll, even the best players may go broke using it to attack $10,000 events. If you can afford 10, 20, or even 50 tournament buy-ins with what you have to risk, you put yourself in a much better position to let your skill win out.

Field Size

It’s a simple correlation: The smaller the buy-in, the larger the field. With some notable exceptions, such as some of the more prestigious World Series of Poker events, you’re likely to get a lot more players showing up for a $100 event than a $1,500 event. Of course, the larger the field, the more money you can win relative to the buy-in, and many players get eliminated concurrently, so it may not take much longer for a large field to get pared down to the money winners as for a smaller field. Of course, if the field is incredibly large, in the thousands, as is the case with many low buy-in online tournaments, you can expect to have to play for a very long time to win any money.

Opponent Skill

You certainly may find skilled players at any level of poker tournament. However, players willing to risk very large sums of money on the chance that they will finish in the top 10 percent of a poker tournament are much more likely to be experienced players. A player plunking down $20 for a poker tournament may well have never even played live poker before. For a player putting down $1,000 this is much less likely to be the case.

For many players, the best bet is to start with lower buy-in tournaments, then as their experience, and hopefully their bankroll, grows, move up to bigger events. Of course, you may also win a satellite to a larger event, and if you do, you should play in it by all means, as you are getting fantastic odds. PokerListings.com offers an extensive poker tournament schedule that will help you find a game that suits your needs.

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