Today, poker tournaments are more popular than ever before much thanks to the intense media coverage they attract, as well as the HUGE amounts of money at stake.

The really cool thing about poker tournaments is that any decent poker player can get lucky and become relatively or even independently wealthy from a quite small investment. There are also many different ways to enter tournaments for free, such as winning an online Satellite Tournament.

The difference between poker games and tournaments is that in a conventional poker game each hand is played independently of each other and the players can quit at any time. In a tournament, the players have to play until they have lost all their chips and the event goes on until there is one ultimate winner. Also, as the tournament progresses, the betting limits are raised, making it increasingly difficult for players with little chips left to remain in the game. When the tournament has its winner, the prize pool money is divided up among the players reaching the final table, giving the biggest amount to the winner.

Most online poker rooms offer a wide variety of Online Tournaments, many of which attract thousands of players and offer huge monetary payouts. But even though there are a huge variety of poker games available on the Web, most online tournaments only include Texas Hold'em, Omaha and 7-card Stud, since these variations tend to attract the largest number of poker enthusiasts.

In order to play in a poker tournament you have to pay two fees: an entry fee to the poker room hosting the event and a buy-in fee, which goes to the prize pool. There are many different variations of poker tournaments when it comes to the amount of the buy-ins and number of levels. However, most tournaments have two things in common. First, all players start playing at the same time and with the same amount of chips. Secondly, the goal of the tournament is for the players to accumulate all of the other players´ chips, thus winning the tournament.

There are many different forms of poker tournaments out there, but "Elimination Tournaments" "Re-buy Tournaments" and "Shootout Tournaments" are among the most common.

Elimination Tournaments
This is a very common type of tournament where all the players begin with same amount of chips and play until one of the players accumulated all the chips, hence becoming the winner. Players play until they have lost all their chips and consequently get removed from the game. Large tournaments always consist of many tables, with 8-10 players each. As players get eliminated, the tables are re-arranged as they are getting fewer. In the end, only one table with the last 8-10 players will remain, until one of the players at that table becomes the winner. An Elimination Tournament is always played non-stop and the players are awarded prize money based on their finishing position in the tournament, with the winner taking home the largest amount of cash.

Re-buy Tournaments
This is a tournament where players who lose all their chips are allowed to buy more chips, during the initial period of the tournament, in order to continue to play. Re-buy Tournaments tend to feature more aggressive plays than other tournaments, since the players do not face elimination even if they lose all their chips early on. Some poker tournaments also allow add-ons, which are similar to the re-buys. However, the add-ons differ from the re-buys in that they are usually only offered once at the end of the re-buy period and can be purchased regardless of how many chips the player has left. All proceeds from the re-buys and add-ons are added to the prize pool - a fact that can make this type of tournament very profitable for the winner and his or her runner-ups.

Shootout Tournaments
This is a tournament where the tables are not re-arranged after the elimination of the players who lose all the chips. Instead, each table plays down to a single winner. These winners then proceed to play against each other until there is only one ultimate winner left.