As a professional player increases his experience and accumulates hours of playing at the tables, his skill will grow and he will be more and more able to play with higher-ranked opponents in almost any poker tournament. But there are several types of poker tournaments and some of them have important differences in their dynamics.
If you are new to this kind of confrontation or you have doubts about what are the characteristics of each one, we recommend you to take a look at the different types of poker you can play.
The most famous types of poker tournaments worldwide
As it happens in every game that has multiple variants and formats, poker can be played in several ways depending on the type of game and the kind of tournament that is being played. There are several game modes and different types of poker tournaments to which the player can access once he has a certain level, so we are going to review the main types so that you know better how they differ.
Freezout Tournaments
A poker freezout tournament is based on the premise of equalizing the conditions of all players at the beginning of the game. Apart from strategy and experience, which will vary according to each player, fairness is the distinctive feature of this poker tournament. The risk, which at the same time is what makes it so interesting, is that any opponent can run out of chips and be permanently eliminated from the game.
In these types of poker tournaments players cannot buy more chips when the stack is getting low, so the ability to manage is an added value. It is a kind of tournament that tends to appeal to aggressive players, as the games are played at a frenetic pace and there is no way back: either you continue or you are permanently eliminated from the round.
Strategy and concentration play a crucial role in this kind of games, more than in any other game modality, because all opponents start on equal terms. Since the outcome of the game is always determined by the players’ ability to manage their chips and adapt their strategy to each moment, for experts a freezout poker tournament is synonymous with quality.
Over time, certain types of poker have been molding their bases and rules according to how the players have faced the games, and the case of freezout tournaments is no different. The freezout tournaments have been combined with other styles and modalities and nowadays they are a kind of games very rich in many aspects, where the skill of the players is far above any other aspect.
Spin & Go Tournaments
In this kind of tournaments, all players start with a stack of 500 chips. Depending on the poker modality that has been used to play (Omaha or Texas Hold’em, mainly), and depending on the type of tournament that has been decided to implement, the rules may vary slightly in a Spin & Go tournament.
Let’s look at the example of a Spin & Go Omaha tournament. Here each player receives four hole cards and has to use a total of two to form his hand. The initial buy-in can range from 25 cents to 250 euros, depending on the amount that each player wants to invest. And always going in line with the amount that can be won depending on the prize multiplier, which can increase by 12,000 times the initial value of the buy-in.
There is an important aspect in this type of tournaments, and it is the frequency. It is a feature of these games and what all players look at to try to anticipate any of the Spin & Go modalities. It is usually more advisable to always focus on the lower frequencies because the higher frequencies tend to be repeated frequently.
In addition, it is advisable to make a good management of the chips and know how to read the game to opt for one of the multipliers of the game. There is a total of eight, which can multiply the initial buy-in by two, three, five, ten, twenty-five, one hundred and twenty, two hundred and forty or twelve thousand. However, in the last five levels the prize is shared among all the players. The winner takes the bulk of the total amount and the rest, 10%.
Sit & Go Tournaments
Sit & Go’s are one of those types of poker tournaments that everyone wants to play at least once in their life. And the fact is that they have been talked about so much that they manage to arouse the curiosity of anyone.
A Sit & Go tournament is a kind of game without a scheduled start time, which allows players to sign up on the spot instead of having to do it in advance. Here, players buy in all for the same price and they all receive the same amount of chips.
The premise here is that players are paid according to the position they occupy at the end of the game and not depending on the amount of chips. And in this type of games the prizes that are established from the quotas are not fixed beforehand.
To be a good Sit & Go tournament player it is important not to play more hands than necessary, not to bluff too much, not to play in too many tables and not to put all the attention in only one hand.
MTT Tournaments
The amount of money that can be won in a game of MTT tournaments can be quite different, especially if we take into account that there are certain types of poker that play with multipliers or specific rules that reward players depending on the final position they occupy in the tournament.
In this last group are the multi-table poker tournaments, known by their acronym MTT (Multi Table Tournaments). In these tournaments there is no limit of players and, as we said, the winnings are defined by the position occupied at the end of the tournament, not by the amount of chips accumulated.
In order to do well in MTT tournaments it is necessary to have a good ability to adapt, since it is necessary to constantly model the style of play according to the changing dynamics of the table in order to adopt a more or less aggressive role.