Poker Re-Buy Tournaments

Even the World Series of Poker main event is a re-buy tournament nowadays. What is a re-buy tournament? A re-buy tournament is a tournament that if you lose all of your chips then you are eligible to re-buy the starting amount of chips within a certain time period of the tournament – usually within the first few rounds or something like that. Another option of most re-buy tournaments is that you will have the ability to have add-ons. Add-ons in poker tournaments is when you have the ability to buy more chips to add-on to your chips stack, sometimes you can only add-on to the starting amount, or sometimes you can add-on until you get to a certain amount of predetermined chips.

What are some of the advantages of the re-buy? The obvious answer to this question is that if you lose then you are able to buy right back in. But this can also be a bad thing for poker players that think they are good, but are really terrible and shouldn’t even be playing in the tournament in the first place. Make sure that you are one of the good ones before you start buying back in re-buy poker tournaments.

Re-buys seem like a disadvantage for bad to decent players that haven’t lost their chips yet because they cannot stand the fact that even if they take out every single poker player that is at their table, they all might just buy back in and one of them might end up taking him out! To a great poker player, whether a player buys back in or not doesn’t really affect them. To a great poker player that just means that they now have a chance to win more money, so the more people that buy back in, the better because they are pretty confident in their game and they are hoping to win big tonight.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s usually not worth it to buy back in. Most players buy back in because they lose on a bad beat or because they basically just made a stupid play and they cant stand the fact that they are out of the tournament. When you buy back in after plays like these, it usually just leads to more losses and more plays on tilt because you feel like you are behind and that you have a lot to make up. You have to be a very calm and disciplined player to buy back into a tournament. First of all when you buy back in you are already feeling down. In times like these, you have to play one hand at a time and you cant be hoping for a miracle hand every single time that the cards are dealt.

If the re-buy tournament that you are playing in is at a casino, or any place where they offer cash games, then it would probably be a good idea to just go ahead and start to try to make money in the cash games. Tournaments are fun, but you should really think about making it a one shot and done deal unless you are a great poker player, or you think that you will be able to dig yourself out of a whole. If you are one of the first ones out in the tournament that is your queue that you aren’t that good of a poker player and that it is definitely time to move on to the cash games. Whatever it is that you decide to do, just make sure that it is you that makes the decision, not tilt.