There are two facets to tournament selection online. The first is site selection. Most players have one or two ‘home’ sites then flit around others for various promotions. It’s well known that some sites have a tougher reputation than others. PKR, luckily for you, has a reputation as having some nice soft spots, which makes it a great place to play! The next is selecting the tournaments themselves. If you’re going to take a shot in an event with a slightly larger buy-in than you would normally play then firstly make sure it’s in your strongest game. Next, aim for a titled event (part of a festival or special promotion) rather than just a standard run-of-the-mill tournament. The named tournaments will attract a greater number of weak players, giving you good value on your buy-in.
Look for tournaments such as the PKR Masters $100,000 guaranteed, which has a large prize pool and lots of players that have satellited in, or tournaments that are part of a larger event such as the PKR Super Series. If you’ve got time try to enter cheaply via a satellite, but if not they’re still good ones to take shots in. As stated, the field is often weakened due to the many satellite qualifiers, meaning a $200 tournament will be full of $20 players. That’s a juicy field in anyone’s book.
Live tourney selection
The poker calendar is absolutely saturated with tournaments and on most weekends you’ve got plenty of options for live play. Obviously location is key here (the closer to home the better to keep expenses down), but sometimes it’s worth going farther afield. Recently I had the chance to play in one of the GUKPT Summer Series events.
I’m London based, but instead of heading to Walsall or Bolton I chose Aberdeen! This was down to the fact that I believed the fields would be softer and smaller (less money but also less variance) because there was a rival tour event happening the same weekend in northern England. History also suggested that Walsall is a tough place to play as it’s long been one of the heartlands of poker in the UK. Similarly, I headed to Bristol one weekend to play a £500 tournament, rather than to Nottingham for a £200 because I knew the field would be smaller and, crucially, worse (it was).
Research is key here. Live schedules are released months in advance and looking around on the various poker forums can give you an idea of the structure, number of runners and much more. If it’s part of a tour there may be a dedicated website too.