Introduction to Non-Standard Poker Tournaments
by Loki Luchs of Predictem.com
With the increasing popularity in poker, more and more tournaments are popping up around the world. However, many casinos and resorts have sought an edge to their competitors; some of these tournaments have found unique formats to try to stand out from the now standard no-limit format.
The World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting-Stars competition was one of the first of the theme-based poker tournaments. Professionals are given a bounty at the beginning of the tournament. Whenever someone knocks out the bountied player, a cash reward of $5,000 is paid. With one bounty per table at the beginning of the tournament, everyone has the opportunity to get a kickback on their $9,600 buy-in. While this certainly puts a lot of extra pressure on the professional players, it also can be used to their advantage. Amateur players looking to take home a professional’s bounty (not to mention a story for the next nickel/dime home game) is more likely to call large bets from the professionals because of the added incentive. Professionals can obviously tighten up their plays when they know that they are likely to have more calling stations making weak crying-calls.
One of the more recent additions to the tournament circuit is Heads-Up Tournaments. This format has been used on the NBC National Heads-up Championship as well as the World Series of Poker. Instead of playing an entire table of opponents, every game is played heads-up, or one-on-one. These tournaments are run in brackets, much like the play-offs in college basketball. Two players face off against each other over a single game of poker. Both players begin with the same number of chips and play until one of them is eliminated. The winner of each round moves to the next level of play. One of the best parts about this structure is that at each new round, opponents begin with the same number of chips. This gives an advantage to the more skilled players, because they will never run into an opponent who starts with a huge chip lead.
A rarely used form of tournament play is the Points-based structure. As seen in the television show Poker Superstars, points-based games are a series of preliminary rounds in which players receive points for which place they are knocked out in; for instance, in Poker Superstars, 24 players compete for points so that they may be allowed into the later stages of the tournaments. With every player eliminated, the point value goes up for the remaining players. The 6th place will receive 0 points, 5thplace- 1 point, 4th place- 3 points, 3rd place- 5 points, 2nd place- 7 points, and 1st place will receive 10 points. After four rounds, the top 16 players are allowed to compete in four person tables, each of which will send the two top players to the semi-finals.
When they reach the later rounds, however, their starting chip stack is relative to the number of points they had in the original season. Each point is worth $25,000 in starting play, giving the advantage to those players who performed best in the preseason. If player-1 had 30 points, they would start with $750,000 in chips. Player 4 may have only had 20 points, so he will only begin with 500,000.
Unlike other poker tournaments, tables will play two times in the final sixteen and the quarterfinals. First the table will play until one player advances; then the 3 remaining players will play again to decide who the second player to advance will be (this double advancement format is not been used in any other tournament structure). In the semi-finals and finals the format is two players (heads-up) playing the best of five games. While Poker Superstars was innovative in their creation of this format, it is unlikely it will ever catch on in mainstream tournaments. It has generally been considered a problematic format since it contradicts many of the basic tournament strategies.