How to play guaranteed tournaments

The number of online poker rooms is growing fast and in the race for more clients, all rooms run guaranteed tournaments. First of all let’s see exactly what are guaranteed tournaments.

A guaranteed is a tournament that has a prizepool assured by the organizer. This means that if the number of entrants is lower than the number required to cover the prizepool, the poker room will add the missing amount. So the prizepool is the same regardless the number of players. The lower the number of entrants is the bigger will be the players’ chance to receive more prize money.

Because of their special feature, guaranteed tournaments attract lots of competitors, including poker shark players. The competition between major poker rooms grows fiercely and as a consequence the prizepools of the guaranteed tournaments reached incredible figures. Currently, biggest guaranteed tournaments have prizepools of over $1,000,000 and their prizes will probably increase over time.

Besides the huge guaranteed tournaments, all poker rooms also have smaller daily guaranteeds that have lower buy-ins and attract fewer entrants. These smaller tournaments are the best choice for beginner poker players because they give you the chance to see how it works and if you can handle the competition.

In order to win or to finish in the money in a guaranteed tournament you need a very good strategy and a good portion of luck. Even shark poker players admit that a good strategy is not enough to win a guaranteed tournament so don’t expect to win all tournaments that you enter.  A good tournament strategy takes into account the three stages that every tournament has: early, middle and late stage.

In early stage the best move is to play tight-aggressive to get to the middle stage with average or slightly above chip stack.  In the middle stage is all about surviving to get into the money so the best thing to do is to protect your stack and to try stealing some blinds. In the late stage, is all about gambling and the luck is the only thing that decides the winner. Is not enough to know this strategy, you need to apply it and the more you practice, the better your result will get.