Finding the right tournaments and sites that run them is key to getting the maximum enjoyment out of them. For me, PokerStars and GGPoker are the two outstanding sites in terms of variation, regularity and size of tournaments. You can quickly sort by different filters, including buy-in level, game type, and operator, making it easier than ever to plan your schedule, find the overlay value and register on time.
For many European players, the cost of traveling out to Las Vegas and staying there for a month simply doesn’t make sense. Watching how Phil Galfond handles a tough spot in Razz, or how a top player approaches Pot Limit Omaha at $50k stakes, teaches you things about hand reading and aggression that transfer directly to your regular game. I have spent time watching and studying the Players Championship specifically because the mixed games format exposes spots that rarely come up in No Limit Hold’em. The Colossus is where I always direct players who want the WSOP experience but whose bankrolls are not ready for the Main Event. Like other WPT festivals, WPT Prime Paris will feature a number of side events and allow re-entries, making the trip to Paris worth your time. You will also get to experience the city’s fabled Christmas markets, a variety of outdoor events, and certainly a snowball fight or two with your poker buddies along the way.
The set of tournaments that the World Series of Poker (WSOP) would evolve into was the brainchild of Las Vegas casino owner and poker player Benny Binion. PokerGO has both tournaments and cash games, including the PGT Championship, Super High Roller Bowl, Poker Masters, U.S. Poker Open, PokerGO Cup, High Stakes Poker, No Gamble, No Future, and more. These sometimes come up in cash poker but are usually reserved for tournaments. When it’s time for the tournament to start, your table will open in a separate window, then it’s time to play some poker. The combination of more events and lower buy-ins gives players at every level the opportunity to build their bankrolls while they hone their skills. At Ignition Poker, you can play dozens of tournaments in a single day – you can even play up to 15 tournament tables at the same time.
Once players start to bust out of the tourney, the tables are balanced so that some of the tables are broken and the players are moved randomly to other tables with empty seats. MTTs take place over multiple tables with a specific number of players per table, usually 9. Similar to all tournaments, every player pays a buy-in fee and gets a stack of chips to play with. In online tournament series, additional prizes can be awarded through leaderboards. When entering a poker tournament, each player pays a fixed buy-in and is given a certain number of tournament chips at the start. Players are eliminated from the tournament once they run out of chips, and only a small percentage of the player pool will win a prize.
This is your chance to turn one strong run into something unforgettable. Get in on the the thrilling Hold’em action this weekend and battle for a piece of the prize pool. Whether they want to experience poker on a grander scale or if they’re a professional looking for their next big win. With the famous hospitality and amenities of The Venetian, like tableside food service from Grand Lux Café. A shorter series designed for locals and those a short drive away.
- In January 2026, the $1,700 WSOPC Las Vegas Main Event attracted 616 entrants, who created a $933,240 prize pool.
- Sit & Go tournaments (SNGs) are fast, single-table games that start as soon as enough players register with no set start time required.
- In a shootout tournament players are usually awarded places in tiers based on how many rounds they lasted and in which place they were eliminated.
- The Sunday Special is another popular weekly event with significant guarantees, making it a staple in the online poker community.
Once you reach the final table, every chip and position counts. If you are the one with a huge stack, now’s your time to apply maximum pressure! Think about the playability of each hand on the latter streets. As blinds increase and stacks shrink relative to blinds, stealing becomes profitable. ”You can’t win the tournament in Level 1, but you can definitely lose it.”
This guide covers all the major Texas Hold’em events and gives you a framework for deciding which ones belong on your calendar. Carrying the biggest stack forward into Thursday’s play is Yuxuan Deng, the only player to bag a seven-figure stack with 1,052,000. After just over eight hours of play, with the field three eliminations away from the money, it was time for what would be a lengthy two-and-a-half-hour session of hand-for-hand play to burst the bubble. The 2026 APT Incheon Main Event has become the largest international Poker News Daily poker tournament ever held in the city, and the second-largest APT Main Event ever held in South Korea. Three different $26,000 NLH events will scatter themselves in between to make up a complete Super High Roller Series.
Super-fast account creation and deposits mean you’ll be registering for our real money poker tournaments in moments. CoinPoker is one of the best online poker sites for tournaments because of the promotions and extra rewards. Blind Rollback and Roll Forward are complete game-changers for tournament players. CoinPoker is one of the world’s best online poker sites for tournaments. Online poker rooms run tournaments with buy-ins from anywhere between $0.5 micro stakes tournaments and $100,000 high roller events. For example, a $100k guaranteed tournament means the prize pool will be at least $100k no matter how many players enter the tournament.
For example, some invitational tournaments do not have buy-ins and fund their prize pools with sponsorship revenue and/or gate receipts from spectators. In some cases, re-buys are conditional (for example, offered only to players low on or out of chips) but in others they are available to all players (called add-ons). Tournament chips have only notional value; they have no cash value, and only the tournament chips, not cash, may be used during play.
Online poker games run 24 hours a day with global player pools. Poker tournaments require players to buy in for a fee then everyone starts with a set amount of chips. The online format means gameplay is faster than live poker. The main types of poker tournaments are Multi-Table Tournaments (MTTs), Sit & Go’s (SNGs), and Turbo Tournaments. Effective stack management is critical in poker tournaments, where losing all your chips means elimination.
It offers mystery bounty tournaments throughout the day. What’s more, during series like their Bounty Hunter Series, expect added mystery bounties with even more value, boosted prize pools and enormous max bounties. As well as running several mystery bounties throughout the day, GG’s Battle Royale Sit and Gos offer you the chance to play them at any time you want. If you’re after daily tournaments, it’s clear of the rest.
If you’re playing tournament poker for the very first time, playing freerolls is an excellent way to get your feet wet. Freerolls are tournaments that are free to enter, yet they have real cash as prizes. Depending on the rules, re-entry events can allow buying back in once, twice, or unlimited times. The re-entry is treated as a whole new buy-in, meaning that the player will get a new seat at a new table when re-entering the tournament. In a re-entry tournament players are allowed to buy back in if they lose all their chips, for a specific number of blind levels (for example the first 10 levels of the tournament).
It caters to a wide variety of players, from seasoned pros to enthusiastic amateurs, as the EKA tournament structure includes multiple buy-in levels, allowing players with different budget levels to participate. The European Poker Tour (EPT), established in 2004, is one of the most prestigious live poker tournament series in Europe. It remains the ultimate stage for the game, continually drawing new players and audiences worldwide. We have compiled information on the dates, venues and format of the tournaments to help you not miss out on the important events.
How much does it cost to play in the WSOP Main Event?
And don’t forget to brush up on your poker ICM to fully capitalize on your deep runs. The biggest poker festival in the world, the World Series of Poker (WSOP), is coming back to Horseshoe and Paris casinos in Las Vegas this summer. 2023 APT Taipei Main Event champion Punnat Punsri will join the Day 3 field from the Natural8 ‘Onlive’ flight with 492,000. Haohui Ma had an eventful couple of levels, starting with a dramatic double-up when he got his pocket kings in against Tomoya Kojima’s aces and drilled a two-outer on the river.
Ensuring Fair Play and Security Online
The winners of each tournament join the WSOP Circuit winners to play the WSOP Global Casino Championship. Although the 2010 event was part of the WSOP Circuit, winners did not earn a gold ring or standing for the WSOP Circuit National Championship, both of which were common for other circuit events. The event moved again in 2013, this time to the Paris suburb of Enghien-les-Bains. The next expansion of the WSOP that included bracelet events was ultimately to Australia. The inaugural WSOPE consisted of three events held in London from September 6–17, 2007.
A key feature is the three-tier buy-in system (Low, Medium, and High), which means every event is available at different price points. PokerStars runs the WCOOP annually with prize pools that have exceeded $100 million. Last year, the event was announced only after the Series in Las Vegas ended, and we expect a similar situation this year. At this time, the WSOP has not announced any dates for WSOP Paradise, but following the success of the inaugural edition last year, we expect to see it added back to the schedule in 2024 as well.
The first tournament to reach a million dollar prize pool was the 1983 WSOP Main Event. Mohegan Sun hosts structured daily tournaments featuring No-Limit Hold ’Em and Bounty formats. Guests can also explore nearby dining options for convenient meals between games. However, in order to win the low half, the player must have an 8-low or better.
There were a couple of spots where if he had called, the tournament would have been over. So, just for the nerds that like to talk theory – when you think about a hold’em hand, and you’re thinking about the combinations of bluffs an opponent has and what value they have. When we got down to heads-up, he had become handcuffed and in really bad shape because he had completely run out of time banks. Sure, there are times when you get coolered, and you’ve got to put it in. It’s a game where I think that people have this completely backward. Sure, deep-stacked you can be adding some limps into your game.
On the major poker sites and networks, you can find a variety of SNGs starting every minute or so. Winning MTTs is not easy, but you’re usually treated with a big score if you manage to make it to the final table or even the top position. The scales are very top-heavy, meaning that the winner can take home tens or even hundreds of times more than the lowest paid finishing spot.
HIGH-STAKES TOURNAMENT ACTION
The luxurious Kings Casino Rozvadov will host another amazing WSOPE poker festival, featuring some of the top European and international players. Between October 4 and 10, European players and visitors from around the world will have the chance to play in the WSOP Main Event in Rozvadov, Czech Republic, the European poker capital. Even if you never play a hand of Stud in your life, the strategic thinking these players demonstrate under pressure is worth the study time. Like events in Barcelona or Prague, WPT Prime Paris will be an event that lets you have plenty of fun away from the tables, as it will be played in one of Europe’s most beautiful tourist destinations.
Caesars Entertainment, via WSOP.com, streamed final-table coverage of all bracelet events on a 5-minute delay, although without pocket cams. The decision was reached because of complaints that rebuy events provided an unfair advantage to professionals with no limitation on how much money they can spend for an event. At this table, the viewers could see the player’s hole cards and subsequent strategy.
Unlike with cash games, the blinds at poker tournaments increase after a set number of minutes. When you play poker tournaments online for money, you can earn up to six figures just by winning a single event. We have some of the best online poker tournaments available, and you can play them from the comfort of your own home – or on the go using your mobile device. Live poker tournaments can be watched online on various streaming platforms such as Twitch, as well as on specialized sites that broadcast poker events. Every year there are multiple live poker tournaments worldwide hosting poker games such as Texas Hold’em, PL Omaha, Drawmaha, and many more.
Since 2004, a Player of the Year (POY) award has been given to the player with the most points accumulated throughout the WSOP. In the 2023 Main Event, a new record was set for entries and a first-place prize for the first time since 2006. Jerry Yang, the winner in 2007, had only been playing poker for two years prior to his victory. Since Reese’s death in December 2007, the winner of this event receives the David ‘Chip’ Reese Memorial Trophy in addition to the bracelet and the prize money. The first $50,000 event, conducted as a H.O.R.S.E. tournament, was won by Chip Reese in 2006. In 2024, entry fees across all events range from $300 to $250,000, the latter being for the Super High Roller event.
All it takes is to lose a few tournaments that are higher buy-ins than usual, and you could burn through your entire bankroll. Medium stacks often play conservatively to lock in a cash. Just follow these five steps below and you’ll be at the tables in no time.
Online poker tournaments are competitive events where every player starts with the same number of chips and plays until one winner remains. Online poker tournaments reward long-term strategy and endurance, while cash games focus on steady profit and flexible session times. For players new to online poker, freerolls, Sit & Go (SNG) tournaments, and low buy-in multi-table tournaments (MTTs) are great starting points. Sit & Go tournaments (SNGs) are fast, single-table games that start as soon as enough players register with no set start time required. Unlike cash games, where players can leave with their chips at any time, tournaments continue until one player has all the chips.
PartyPoker tops our list for the best poker site for freerolls and it was an obvious pick. That means you might be finding yourself playing for hours and only winning a few cents. There really isn’t a catch – freerolls are free and you can (often) win real money or other prizes. They’re perfect for beginners, bankroll builders and anyone looking to play without spending real money. At PokerNews, we’ve reviewed the top tournament sites in the US, Canada, UK and around the world. And this is what draws so many to the tournament format.
The record-breaking APT Incheon Main Event drew 1,393 entries and generated a $2.15 million prize pool, more than double its $1M guarantee. If you’re playing at a higher level, or if you just want to stop by and watch those who are, the PokerGO Tour will be back on the beat with its fall schedule. No matter where you might toss the dart on the calendar, you’ll find something to play, so we did a deep dive on the schedule to map out the rest of 2026. The World Series of Poker is gone but poker never stops in Las Vegas.
If you’re eager to play in live poker tournaments rather than just watching or checking results, numerous online qualification opportunities are available. Thanks to partnerships with leading online poker platforms, players can qualify for APPT events via online satellites, enhancing accessibility for newcomers and seasoned players alike. The World Poker Tour (WPT), launched in 2002, is a globally renowned series of televised poker tournaments, with a strong focus on events in the United States.
Certain tournaments, known as bounty tournaments, place a bounty on some or all of the players. Rather than risk losing their winnings, as one of them would if the game were continued, these two players may be allowed to split the prize proportional to their in-game currency (or however they agree). Play continues, in most tournaments, until all but one player is eliminated, though in some tournament situations, especially informal ones, players have the option of ending by consensus. Some tournaments offer the option of a re-buy or buy-back; this gives players the option of purchasing more chips. Unlike in a ring game (or cash game), a player’s chips in a tournament cannot be cashed out for money and serve only to determine the player’s placing. It can feature as few as two players playing on a single table (called a “heads-up” tournament), and as many as tens of thousands of players playing on thousands of tables.
When using middling stack sizes of big blinds, players should carefully balance their 3-betting strategy with both strong and weak hands. As the blinds increase and stacks get shallower, players should adopt a more aggressive approach to maximize their chances. The WPT Alpha8 for One Drop event had a buy-in of $111,000, showcasing high-stakes tournament play. The WSOP offers a comprehensive experience, featuring games from Texas Hold’em to Omaha, and limit to no-limit games. These events are about more than just prize money; they embody the experience, competition, and prestige of winning. The tournament structure at ACR Poker includes a variety of formats such as freezeouts, re-entries, and multi-table tournaments.
