Online Poker Tournaments - The Biggest And Best
The two major types of poker tournaments are live tournaments and online tournaments. This page will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both.
Playing poker tournaments at live venues has become extremely popular in recent times. Many land based casinos now have a dedicated poker room area where players can play cash games and tournaments. Tournaments allow a player to "buyin" to the tournament where every play starts with the same chip stack. When one player has all the chips they are declared the winner and generally receive 50% of the total prize pool.
The biggest prize pools in the world are found in the major live poker tournaments and poker championships. The World Series of Poker is the premiere live poker tournament event, and the WSOP Main Event offers the largest poker tournaments prize pool you will find anywhere.
Winning live events gives poker players plenty of kudos, but it is rarely the most cost effective way to play poker. Most modern professional poker players are very selective about the live tournaments they play, choosing the right events based on sizable prize pools and the chance of media exposure that can be leveraged for places in exclusive televised tournaments or cash games.
Below we have listed the most popular and lucrative live venue poker tournaments:
European Poker Tour
The European Poker Tour is the most accessible major live poker tournament tour for players in Europe to attend. As you might expect, many European poker pros fill out the fields in EPT events.
World Poker Tour
The World Poker Tour is the second most important live tournament series in the world, though it is far more accessible given the number of locations that it holds events in and the fact it runs over a longer time period each year.
World Series Of Poker
The World Series of Poker, or WSOP, is the premier live poker tournament series worldwide. Held each year in Las Vegas since 1970, the WSOP grew in prestige with the rising popularity of poker.
World Series Of Poker Europe
The World Series of Poker Europe, or WSOPE, is an attempt by the WSOP owner Harrah's to expand the World Series of Poker brand into worldwide events. This is a tough ask given how long other major events have been operating in the region.
World Series of Poker Circuit
The World Series of Poker Circuit, or WSOP Circuit, is a WSOP branded poker tournament circuit that runs in the lead up to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas each year.
Grand Series of Poker
The Grand Series of Poker, or GSOP, is both an online and live series of poker tournaments that is run by the Ongame poker software platform.
Aussie Millions
It is a very popular event in the Pacific region, but it also draws a surprising number of poker pros from the United States.
Irish Poker Open
Renowned as one of the oldest events on the European Poker scene, the Irish Poker Open has become a popular tournament for not only Europeans professionals, but also players around the world.
Latin American Poker Tour
The Latin American Poker Tour, or LAPT, is an annual poker series that has run since 2008 throughout countries in Central America and South America. It is a series sponsored by PokerStars and it brings big money tournament action south of the border.
Asia Pacific Poker Tour
The Asia Pacific Poker Tour, or APPT, is an international poker tour in the region of the Pacific and South East Asia. It is sponsored and run by the online poker site PokerStars, and as such manages to draw much larger fields.
Australia New Zealand Poker Tour
The Australia New Zealand Poker Tour is a PokerStars sponsored poker tour with multiple stops in both Australia and New Zealand. While both countries are already part of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, the popularity of poker in these two nations is greater.
Italian Poker Tour
The Italian Poker Tour is among the newest offerings in PokerStars live regional tournament tours, with stops all over one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The buy-ins to Italian Poker Tour events are very reasonable.
Online Poker Tournaments
Online poker tournaments still can't top the biggest live tournaments in terms of prize pools, but they beat out live tournaments in every other respect. You can play in online poker tournaments in a much larger range of buy-ins than live tournaments and do it all from the comfort of your own home. There are even frequently online poker tournaments with multi-million dollar prize pools these days, which you would normally be required to travel to a large city to play in if they were live tournaments.
The biggest online poker tournaments are found at PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, the two most highly populated poker rooms online. They each hold massive tournaments each Sunday that are often worth millions, and they both have major online poker tournament series. The major online poker tournament series at PokerStars is the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), while the major online poker tournament series at Full Tilt Poker is the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS). Many other online poker rooms also offer big online poker tournaments, but not as big as those found in these two series.
What makes online poker tournaments especially attractive for new poker players is the fact that you can find tourneys with buy-ins of $1 or less. This is helpful when you are just starting out, as the holes in your game will be less costly. Online poker tournaments also allow you to take on harder competition in smaller increments and to get thousands of hands played in far less time than this would take in live poker tournaments. We really cannot recommend online poker tournaments enough for poker beginners.
