The dream of winning big bucks for a small outlay (sometimes none at all) drives thousands upon thousands of keen poker aficionados to online poker sites to “try their luck”, and the sites are to promote satellites to big tournaments in order to attract lower stake clients to their web sites. However, is the fantasy of hitting the big time – or at least making a mighty big difference to their bankroll – justified?
PokerStars hosts a daily freeroll qualifier to a game with an $80.000 guaranteed payout. Only the top six players in the qualifier win seats to the $80K game (which has a $50 buy in), yet within minutes of the registration period opening over twenty thousand players will have entered. The capacity for this game was recently raised to forty thousand players to cope with the demand, and most nights it is still fully subscribed within thirty minutes.
If you stop and calculate the odds of qualifying for the “big game”, it is over 6.665/1, and this is before you are competing to actually win any money. To actually finish in the top six takes almost five hours of play on a normal evening, so if you are a person who earns $10 per hour or more, one would think that you might as well skip the qualifier and go straight to the game.
PokerStars also run an “astronomers” freerolls run every forty minutes in which players on the final eight tables qualify for a weekly final with a prize pool of $2.000. These are also regularly fully subscribed, and offer odds of just over 100/1 that you will qualify. The same scenario applies to the hourly freerolls hosted by Full Tilt Poker for their weekly finals and the low entry feeders on PartyPoker and other small sites. PartyPoker currently have freerolls at the lowest level of their WSOP qualifications which are also extremely well subscribed to.
In fact, the smaller sites, such as Titan Poker and Pacific Poker, actually have an advantage over the “Big 2” for the individual trying to qualify for a larger event. This is because there are not the huge numbers of competitors in opposition and it may be easier to win seats at more valuable contests – although the opportunities to do so are not so frequent.
Once you move up from the freerolls and low entry qualifiers, you will find a higher standard of play. A typical $10 qualifier may enable progression to a final with a $200+ buy-in, and these represent excellent value to good players who will finish in the top ten per cent required. The winner of a tournament with several satellites feeding it, or a $200 buy-in, is likely to have a payday in excess of $50.000 – not bad for $10 and a far better investment than spending five hours going through freerolls or low stakes games to qualify for a smaller prize. Therefore it is fair to say that entering a reasonably small satellite represents excellent value for a player of high standard.
There is also good reason for players of average ability, and even poor players, to get involved in this type of satellite, as it means that you would be participating in tournament play with some of the very best and most experienced players online. This would definitely be a valuable practical lesson, and also may lead to a substantial payout at the end of the adventure. Again, entering satellites for the larger competitions can represent excellent value and should be something that all calibers of online poker players consider.
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