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Welcome to Tournament Watch

The most popular form of texas holdem tournament is that seen on television most often, the No Limit Freeze Out. No Limit obviously refers to the betting. There is no maximum on any bet you'd like to make at a no limit table. There is however, a minimum bet. If you plan to raise the bet, you must raise by at least the amount of the bet in front of you. I've seen home games where this wasn't quite understood.

For example, if the blind bet is $20, a player cannot just toss in a $25 chip and say they are raising $5. You must raise by the amount of the bet in front of you, which in this case is $20. So if a player is raising here, they must put at least $40 into the pot. $20 to cover the bet, and a $20 raise.

When re-raising, you must re-raise by the amount of the raise in front of you. If the bet was $20, and i make it $100 ($20 bet + $80 raise), you must re-raise it by at least my $80 (making it $180 total).

The "freeze-out" part means once your chips are gone, you must leave the table. There is no chance to "re-buy".

Besides betting procedures, another common area of questioning is the blinds. Specifically, what happens when a player who should be paying a blind gets knocked out of the tourney on the previous hand. The rule of thumb when moving the blinds is that the big blind escapes no one. Granted, it may not happen that way at all of the online poker rooms, but in the real world of face-to-face poker, the big blind escapes no one.

The easy way to keep track of moving the blinds is to move the big blind one player each hand, and establish the dealer behind it. If the person paying the small blind has been knocked out, no one pays the small blind. But the big blind moves only one chair at a time.

It is perfectly ok for someone to deal twice in a row. It is even ok for someone to deal three times in a row. It is not ok for someone to have the big blind skip over them, or to pay the big blind twice in a row.

Another common accurance in a texas holdem tournament is splitting an uneven pot. If there is an extra chip left after splitting a pot, and you have a house rule, wonderful. As long as you do the same thing consistently, all should be well. I've seen players want to leave the chip in the middle for the next hand. This I don't agree with, I prefer to award the entire pot after each hand. There is no sense leaving change for the next hand.

What we do is award the chip to the player in earlier position. That way the pot is empty for the beginning of the next hand.

Another tournament oddity takes place when two people are knocked out on the same hand. What happens if three players are left, and two are knocked out together? Who takes second, who takes third? One way of dealing with this is to award the higher place finish to the person with the bigger stack going in. Small stack takes lower place finish.

If the hand takes place and the players were even in chips (or even enough that no one can say for certain who had the bigger stack) a gentlemen's agreement to split the awards solves the problem. Add the monies for the two places and simply divide by two.

Besides the popular No Limit Freeze-Out tournaments, there are other varieties of poker tournament. Visit the other pages of our site site to find out what other tournament formats are used in casinos today, and perhaps spice up your home games by testing out some new tournament styles.