There are many reasons to play to play in poker tournaments probably as many as there are tournament poker players. Poker tournaments are rewarding, exciting, lucrative and very useful for gaining experience, which is so important to become a good poker player. Poker tournaments have shown a massive increase in popularity in the recent years and are now not the playground for the pros and stars but a way for all players to have fun and win a good payout.

First of all poker tournaments are real fun, full of competition and thrill. Of course it is nice to play in a cash ring game and leave the table with more cash at the end but it can’t be compared with the feeling of joining a tourney together with many other players and waking away the winner over them all. Tournaments offer fantastic pay outs to the players who make into the money which are rarely met by the cash games. These days poker tournaments usually have prize pools in the thousands of dollars and huge earning opportunities.

When you take part in a poker tournament you also have a chance to learn the game inexpensively. If you enter a low buy-in tourney you get plenty of action for your money, if you are good or get lucky the tournaments can give you good two or three hours of poker game. It is also an excellent chance to learn a new variety of poker such as Razz, Omaha Hi-lo and the others for limited amounts of money without the risks of mounting losses to worry about.

Playing in tournaments players can concentrate their efforts becoming more skilful and knowledgeable in the game on the budget that suits them. Not only your costs are set by the tournament buy-in when players enter the tourneys they find that the game tends to be more pure than at the ring tables. The opponents know that they can only last in the game until they run out of chips and can not rely on unlimited amounts of extra buy-ins and top up their losses at any time. That is why players tend to play more by the book and follow the rules. So this is an ideal opportunity to see how poker theory works in practice. Too often in cash games, especially on low limits, players act "crazy" against all rules and logic relying too much on the bankroll to support them and gamble unnecessarily.

Tournaments are also a great chance to compare your skills against some of the top players. Of course you will not find the pros at $20 buy-in level in a small casino but in a large poker room with $200 buy-in players of top calibre are certainly present and give every one a chance to measure up their game against the strong competition. Nothing builds up the confidence of a player than sitting at the same table with a pro and sending him to the rail.

There is a huge number of online poker tournaments offered by all online poker rooms with different levels of buy-in to suit every budget including freerolls where beginners can test their skills for free and without risking a cent of their own. There are multi-table tournaments, where a big number of players compete for the top prize, sit and go tournament that run throughout the day and begin as soon as the required number of players register, heads-up tournaments where two players compete against each other. Online poker tournaments can have different structure. Some allow re-buys and add-ons, where players can add more chips during set period of time, some tournaments are freeze out, where no extra funds can be added.

Online poker rooms often offer their players a chance to qualify to big live poker events such as WSOP, WPT and many other prestigious poker tournaments through the series of satellites. Players who enter big live tourneys mostly do not buy themselves in directly but go through the stages in online poker tournaments. Such satellites often begin from a small buy-in amount, which can be less than $1, and give ordinary players a chance to work their way up into the final and then into the Main Event. History knows many examples when amateurs entered the big events and won over world champions. With growing popularity of online poker satellites such success story have become more frequent and opened the door to the elite tourneys to millions of players around the world.