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Texas Hold'em Rules: Tournaments

If you play Texas Holdem, you probably know the rules of the game. However, if you’ve only played cash games, you may not be quite clear on how tournaments work. Tournament poker can be a lot of fun for Texas hold’em players, and there are only a few things that differentiate it from a cash game. All poker sites offer tournaments, so you won’t have any trouble finding one to play in.

Tournament Texas Hold’em Rules

Chip Counts:

In Texas hold’em poker tournaments, everyone gets the same number of chips to start. This number can be the same as the buy-in or a different pre-determined amount. When a player runs out of chips, he is eliminated from the tournament. He cannot buy back into the game. The exception to this is a rebuy tournament, where players can buy a pre-determined number of chips for an extra fee, usually for the first hour of the tournament.

Blinds:

This is probably the most important distinction between tournaments and cash games. In tournaments, blinds go up. If not, tournaments might never end, as players could sit back and hoard large stacks of chips. Since the blinds rise every round, players need to get into action, and eventually one player will end up with all the chips.

Payout Structure

In the early days of tournaments, only the player who ended up with all the chips won any money, which was not very appealing to everyone else. Now, tournaments have a graded payout structure, where the winner gets the bulk of the prize pool, the second place player gets a bit less, and so on down the line, for the top ten percent or so of the competitors.
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