Low Participation at Tournaments - Good or Bad?

You log on to your favorite site, check out the tournament schedule and notice there are a lot of tournaments with even more players signed up to. You'll be facing off against thousands of players, which will certainly raise the pot divided up between the winners. Of course lots of players at the tables will also lower your winning chances, especially because of the aggressive play you'll encounter at tournaments of this category, although tournament play at freerolls for example is even less predictable.

There is a huge benefit of a large amount of players tournaments where the prize money completely consists of the buy in the players pay to sign up, it's a pretty logical equation, the more players the higher the pay off.

This benefit crumbles when it comes to guaranteed tournaments though. Of course the prize money will elevate with more players signing up, paying the buy in and stacking up with rebuys during the tournament, but the competition will grow simultaneously. The guaranteed prize will remain even if the minimum sign ups have barely been reached, here we see a benefit as well. Battling 200 players for €5,000 - €10,000 is not only a lot faster, your winning chances compared to playing against 2,000 players will also rise, giving the players a higher probability of ending up in the money.

This is actually what a lot of players do, they check out the sites for low participation guaranteed tournaments, sign up and cash the money with minimal effort and in minimal time. You might actually sack in more by taking part at several low participation tournaments than playing a 5 hour tournament against thousands of opponents where you end up losing against a lucky donker in the end.

Try it out, you'll see a large difference compared to the million dollar freerolls you'll encounter. If this guide got you interested you might want to check out a few guaranteed poker tournaments with high winning chances right here. One thing to watch out for is new sites which turn out to be scam in the end without any payouts or other horror stories, a quick background check at google should quickly make clear if any risks await the player.

If you're looking to improve your play check out these poker strategy guides by professional poker players.