The idea is to make it through the early stage with average or above chips, giving you room to maneuver as you enter the middle stage.

The middle stage will range from being deep-stacked at the start lots of chips compared to blinds to short-stacked near the end.

In this stage chips are quickly becoming more valuable and each round of blinds potentially brings you one step closer to elimination.

It's at this point you can no longer afford to sit around waiting for only the best hands. You need to steal blinds and protect your chips to keep yourself from getting short.

Once you get too short your only move left is all in. If you take the risk to stay healthy and lose, you still have a handful of chips to try again with.

If you wait until you're in dire straits you have no second chance. The goal with the middle stage is simply to stay alive and get yourself into the money a tournament pro, though, likely cares little about making the money and plays to win at all times.

Once you're into the money, you've entered the late stages of the tourney. The late stage will have many players with very few chips and a few players with a lot of them.

This is the time of a tournament when everyone's willing to gamble. Once you're in the money, people no longer care about going bust and are aiming for the win at all times.

You need to play very aggressively, make few or no mistakes, and get lucky at the right times to have a shot at the title. Luck is always a part of poker, and in tournaments it becomes a large factor of the game in the later stages.

With the blinds being very large, and many stacks being very short, most players will be playing a simple all-in or fold game.

You need to be willing to take coin flips, and have the luck to win them if you want to finish in first. Watch poker on TV, listen to webcasts and watch strategy videos.

But above all else, you're going to have to play as much poker as you can. The more tournaments you play, the better you will become at playing them.

Many of the best tournament players in the world play hundreds to thousands of tournaments each year. Read, play, reflect and discuss! Players who enter these tournaments get to play for stakes and in fields much bigger than they might be used to, and they also get to explore new cities and countries.

Many players thus find poker tournaments to be awesome vacations, especially if they can find relatively cheap ways to enter.

I recommend Europe from March through the fall: some of my favorite tournament spots are Barcelona, Budapest, Vienna, and Deauville.

The 3x-turbos appear to have a lot of wild play and variance but I like them because the goal is relatively simple. Before the add-on the best strategy is simply to minimize the number of rebuys you take; after, the tournament resembles a small turbo satellite, with just a few tables of players fighting for one or two packages.

There are often rebates given to the next handful of players, and these prizes help soften the swings.

Finally, these tournaments are desirable because they take only hours instead of a whole day. Once you win or buy the seat you have to plan for the trip itself.

I would strongly recommend that you arrive at least two days early; three is even better. This will allow you to adjust to jet lag and to get comfortable in the new city.

Such a project is fine for some people but more often it makes what should be a fun and enriching experience into a chore and a blur.

I prefer to relax and experience a new culture: for example, there is often unfamiliar and delicious food available.

How can Poker Stars not be 1 for tournaments? Are the tournaments on really that good? Play Here. Individual bounties or total bounties collected by the end of a tournament may be used to award prizes.

Bounties usually work in combination with a regular prize pool, where a small portion of each player's buy-in goes towards his or her bounty.

Other tournaments allow players to exchange some or all of their chips in the middle of a tournament for prize money, giving the chips cash value. Separate portions of each player's buy-in go towards a prize pool and a "cash out" pool.

The cash out rate is typically fixed, and a time when players may not cash out such as the final table is usually established.

The remaining cash out pool is either paid out to the remaining field or added to the regular prize pool. Tournaments can be open or invitational.

Multi-table tournaments involve many players playing simultaneously at dozens or even hundreds of tables.

Satellite tournaments to high-profile, expensive poker tournaments are the means of entering a major event without posting a significant sum of cash.

These have significantly smaller buy-ins, usually on the order of one-tenth to one-fiftieth the main tournament's buy-in, and can be held at various venues and, more recently, on the Internet.

Top players in this event, in lieu of a cash prize, are awarded seats to the main tourney, with the number of places dependent on participation.

The opposite of a multi-table tournament is a single-table tournament , often abbreviated STT. A number of places typically, two, six or nine are allocated at a single table, and as soon as the required number of players has appeared, chips are distributed and the game starts.

This method of starting single-table tournaments has caused them to be referred to as sit-and-go SNG tournaments, because when the required number of players "sit", the tournament "goes.

A single-table tournament effectively behaves the same as the final table of a multi-table tournament, except that the players all begin with the same number of chips, and the betting usually starts much lower.

Almost invariably, fixed payoffs are used. A tournament series may consist of either single-table or multi-table tournaments. In a tournament series, multiple tournaments are played in which prizes are awarded.

However, a series leaderboard or standings system is often used and additional prizes, drawn from the individual tournament buy-ins, are awarded to those who perform best overall in the series.

Major poker tournaments such as the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker, use standings to determine a player of the year.

The most common playing format for poker tournaments is the "freezeout" format. All players still playing in a tournament constitute a dynamic pool.

Whenever a player loses all his chips and gets eliminated, his table shrinks. To combat the constant shrinking of tables and avoid having tables play with varying numbers of players, players are moved between tables, with unnecessary tables getting closed as the tournament progresses.

In the end, all remaining players are seated on just one table, known as the "final table". Most sit and go tournaments are freezeouts.

Rebuy tournaments often allow players to rebuy even if they have not lost all their chips, in which case the rebuy amount is simply added to their stack.

A player is not allowed to rebuy in-game if he has too many chips usually the amount of the starting stack or half of it. Another playing format is the "shootout" tournament.

A shootout tournament divides play in rounds. In a standard shootout tournament, players sit on each table and the table roster remains the same until everyone but one player is eliminated.

The table winners progress to the final table where the tournament winner is determined. 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.

Shootouts can include multiple rounds triple, quadruple or quintuple shootout or feature several players from each table progressing usually up to three.

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