In 2002, people saw the first series of the WPT on the television. It was aired in the spring of 2003 on the Travel Channel on American cable TV. The World Poker Tour series have led to a visible boom in the table game.

The most attractive part of the World Poker Tour is that anybody who can afford the “buy-in” or has been a winner of a “satellite” tournament” is eligible to compete against the professional poker players.

The good news for wannabe poker entrepreneurs is that the payouts from many casinos are uncapped, claims Richard Prew, media director of poker association, APAT. He says there are ‘no winning limits’ in licenced UK venues. APAT also advises there is no substitute to vast pots of money and playing experience when it comes to bringing home the bacon from poker.

Having the right psychological makeup and personality is also a trump card when playing for small fortunes. Players must also have the mettle and money to ride out the bad times when suffering streaks of bad luck, he stresses.
So who actually makes a living from poker? Prew believes the ‘majority’ of poker players play the game for fun and/or to supplement their income, with a small nucleus of professionals doing so to make a living. Traditionally, online casino don’t offer much value for money for recreational players, he says. But for high stake players, wanting to gamble on high stake tours, there are enticing yet risky opportunities to make fast and furious bucks.
The Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, launched in 2007, is a series of poker festivals that take place across venues and online. Each festival features several warm up events with buy ins ranging from $140 (£100) to $1400 (£1000) for the four-day main event. The stakes are raised to $4199 (£3000) at the end of the year for the tour’s Grand Final. As with the scale of poker played across the world, its winnings are far from loose change: Prize money for the televised main events in the tour’s first year topped $4.9n (£3.5m).
Professionals, amateurs and internet qualifiers number those who have pitted their wits for a place in history and life changing amounts of money.

With one player winning $105,000 (£75,000) for the first event this year, livelihoods can clearly be made – but for how long? Surely the odds of winning such sums over a lifetime are slim? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the chances, it is vital the player knows the game inside out before he or she endeavours to pay off the mortgage. Again, having a king’s ransom in cash reserves goes without saying!
For online poker players, Prew advises there is no best global region in which to play poker, provided the site is international and properly licensed and governed. Legally above boards sites, he says, are carefully regulated, and display terms and conditions for banking, fraud prevention and account protection.
Those who play online or at casinos every Friday night will not need a maths lesson to realise that poker can be a slippery science to make a living. Likewise. APAT advises that cheap ‘Rebuy’ poker tournaments, which enable players to buy more chips when they lose them, are not recommended as poker gold mines.
Organisations such as APAT, Sky Poker, Virgin and PKR aim to provide recreational players with professional online and poker tours with ‘many starting chips’ and buy ins for under $140 (£100). Such events sell out within minutes of going on sale.

Inevitably, these sums are not enough to live on for a year; the art of poker playing demands a seasoned rounder not only to make a living, but to cover losses.
Unlike other games, practice makes viable, but not perfect poker. This, of course, is the substance of dreams. Few of us will be lucky enough to take home $8.5m (£5.8m) as won by Peter Eastgate, at last year’s World Series of Poker final. But there’s no harm in dreaming is there?

The 40th Annual World Series of Poker is set to happen from May 27, 2009 up to July 15, 2009, although the results of the final event will be known only on November 10, 2009.  All WSOP events will take place at the Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

WSOP 2009 Events

This year, there will be 57 bracelet events and 1 non-bracelet special event.  There are to be no rebuys and add-ons for all events.

The tournament will open on May 27 with the Casino Employees No-Limit Hold’em.  This will be followed by the 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em and by the Omaha Hi-Low Split-8 or Better.  All three are single-day events.

From May 30th to June 4th, 9 multiple-day events will take place.  Event 4 is a 4-day No-Limit Hold’em.  Events 5 to 12 are all 3-day events and they include:
•    Three No-Limit Hold’em events: events 7, 9 (6-handed), and 11;
•    Two Pot-Limit events:  Omaha (event 5) and Hold’em/Omaha (Event 10);
•    One 2-7 Draw Lowball event (event 8); and
•    Two World Championship events:  Seven Card Stud (event 6) and Mixed (event 12).

From June 5 to June 30, there will be 44 3-day events.  Many poker variants will be played during this period.  There will be Hold’em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Low, H.O.R.S.E., 7-Card Stud, 2-7 Draw Lowball, 7-Card Razz, Triple Chance, and Mixed events.  Some events will be of the No-Limit type while some will be of the Limit and Pot-Limit type.

The special, single-day, Ante Up for Africa Charity event is scheduled on July 2.  The following day, the 13-day final event – the World Championship No-Limit Texas Hold’em will commence.  By July 15th, the players will have been whittled down to the final 9 who will play at the Final Table from November 8 to 10, 2009.

How to Join

If you wish to play at the 40th WSOP, choose your event/events and pre-register at the WSOP website until 2 weeks before the start of your event/events then complete your registration beginning on May 26.

You must pay the full event/events buy-in with pre-registration.  The buy-in for the Final Event is $10,000.  You can also participate in WSOP satellite games to win a seat in the WSOP for only a minimal investment.

Practicing for multi-table tournaments
All multi-table tourneys are terminated with short-handed games. If you prefer to be prepared for it, you should first practice in short-handed ring-game conditions. Multi-table tourneys alone don’t provide sufficient chances to practice short-hand games, however, because you allocate the vast majority of your time at full games.  After you at last make it entirely to the end, and table size begins to shrink, your level of skill becomes critical. Completing just one position up at the standings may mean as much as double your prize money.

For that reason, if nothing else, I suggest you practice a lot with head’s-up and short-handed play. If the stakes are high enough, you get nervous enough and thinking “Oh nice, now I’m at head’s up. I absolutely have no idea how I should play, and five grands are at stake.”
If you face a long drought without winning prize money in multi-table tournaments, you should consider occasionally brushing up your shorthanded skill through ring tables (because the drought implies you haven’t seen short-handed games in some time).

Preparing for single-table tournaments
If you prefer to play single-table on demand tourneys, you should first practice on unusual-size games, because these tournaments move from full game to short game quickly. If you play comfortably and have a bit luck on your side, you may quickly go from a full game to short-handed to head’s up, so you have to make sure you are ready to play at all levels..
After you systematically enjoy success in single-table tournaments, you don’t have to return and keep playing the ring game variants.  And if you find yourself continuously losing at a certain level in the tourney, even if you are in the prize money, you should find a ring game of the size you are having trouble with and brush up your skill again. For example, if you are always busting out of no-limit tourneys in second place, play a few head’s-up ring games.

The busiest online poker rooms have fifteen times the number of people you can find in a real life poker establishment. Due to the sheer quantity of players, you can continuously find thriving tournament scenery, regardless of the time. Your choices start from head’s-up tourneys, where you deal with a single opponent (your entry fee versus his), all the way to immense multi-table tournaments where you’ll be able to win armored cars laden to the gun holes with hard cash.

Technically you won’t see any tournament forms online that you can’t encounter in the real life poker world. However, the truth that they inhabit the online realm does allow them to mutate slightly.

Any given poker web site has tournaments on demand that start in size from ‘two players’ head’s up to some short-handed games (5 or 6 players, depend entirely to the site) to full single-table tournaments. You also come across scheduled tourneys that you can pre-register for and start on a certain time and day. Pre-registration tourneys are always big multi-table affairs. To find any of those tournaments, simply click on the tourney tab of your site’s main screen.  In many cases, you buy-in (in free-rolls you need to register, without a fee) for a specific entry fee amount, plus a little registration fee that is paid to the house (for example $15 entry fee and $2 registration fee). And in exchange for the fee, the site provides a pre-determined amount of tournament chips (about 1,500) and an open seat in the tourney.

The tournament lobby (where you can register for the tourney) has a great deal of information, including:

• The time when the tournament begins.
• The elapsed time (if the tournament has started or already over).
• The prize pool and the distribution.
• The names of players playing in the tournament (and the number of players are currently participating).
• Your chip rank compared to other players in the tournament.
• Rules on add-ons and re-buys.
• The standings of opponents as they fall.

Some poker sites also have a unique wrinkle in their Hold ’Em and Omaha tournaments.
When blinds get quite large (say 300/600), they will add an ante, which is generally ten percent of the small blind (twenty-five percent in some cases), that everyone adds to the pot on each hand. The ante grows as the blinds rise. Sites add up the ante to urge betting actions later in a tourney, partially by raising the pre-flop pot amount and partially by adding extra pressure to the short stack.

World Series of Poker

The most popular names–like the ones listed in this blog–of poker will attend the competition, which is held annually in-you guessed it-Las Vegas, Nevada. Since 1971, when the first competition was held, the fame of the event has reached as high as the skys, and the desire in poker players all over the globe to be a participant has managed to climb higher than that. This is the spot where records have been shattered and names have been made. Either you ‘personally’ remembered the event when Hoyt Corkins won his first bracelet in 15 years, or merely read about it, as well the time in 2007 when they tried out the new (hit-and-miss) ‘Poker Peek’, which caused everyone to misread the board, that events that occur within the World Series walls are as unforgettable as any event can get.

You should practice.

That age-old adage “practice makes perfect” really do matter in tournaments.  If you want to win, you have to practice your game in order to hone your skills.  You will need not only luck but excellent skills as well to win against players, especially those that are better than you are.

You should have a good rest.

Before the day of the tournament itself, you should have finished all the practicing and all the perfecting of your skills.  What you will need is a good day’s rest so that you are relaxed during the game.  Remember, a heavy head in need of a deep sleep is a harbinger of losing a game.

You should be focused.

Of course, you need determination in winning in any kind of tournament, so during the game itself, you should always concentrate on what’s before you and not on what’s around you.  Before the tournament, you should practice and acquire the skill of blotting out unnecessary sounds and distractions so that you become more focused on your game.

You should be a good sport.

If you win, accept it gracefully, and if you lose, you should also accept losing just as gracefully.  Never become a brat.  Instead, always be a good sport.

You should have patience.

Not all players are the same.  You will meet different players of different temperaments, so you should have lots of patience in dealing with their kinds.

You should be confident.

This is very important in playing and winning a tournament.  You should have confidence in yourself.  If you lack confidence, then your lack of it will surely show in the way you play your game.

You should always be on your guard.

It does not matter what kind of tournament you are playing at, but being on your guard at all times assures you that you will not be cheated by those thinking of cheating in order to win the tournament.  So always listen and always be alert.

You should not be too transparent.

Of course, you should not be too transparent when it comes to playing at tournaments.  Your usual habits when you know you are doing well or vice versa will serve as an invitation for others to react based on how you usually react.  Change your habits once in a while to keep them guessing.

You should not talk too much.

Everybody dislikes a talkative player.  It may be just a strategy or it may simply be the player’s nature, but either way, this kind of attitude distracts other players, so you should learn to respect other players if you want them to respect you in return.

You should not be too overconfident.

Just because you have practiced a lot and know you are good in your game does not mean that you will win the tournament.  There is always the possibility of somebody else being far better than you are that you might actually lose the game to him, so before any kind of tournament, you should not expect too much.  Instead, you should go into the tournament without being too overconfident.