The best online poker tournaments for real money could potentially help you win more than a million dollars, even if you start with just $1. With a bit of luck, lots of skill, and by carefully selecting the right games and formats for you, you can significantly boost your bankroll from an affordable, single-digit buy-in.
Whether you’re looking for quick-access Sit & Go tournaments, a random shot at up to 12,000x your buy-in (usually lasting less than 10 minutes), or multi-day MTTs with pathways to WSOP live events and guarantees of up to $12.5 million, the best online poker sites for tournaments have them all.
Poker Sites With the Biggest Tournaments
In This Guide
- Poker Sites With the Biggest Tournaments
- How Does an Online Poker Tournament Work?
- Pros and Cons of Online Poker Tournaments
- Different Types of Poker Tournaments
- Best Bonuses for Tournament Players
- Most Popular Online Poker Tournament Games
- Supported Payment Methods at Poker Tournament Sites
- A Quick Look at the Best Sites for Online Poker Tournaments
- Our Verdict
- FAQs
How Does an Online Poker Tournament Work?
You pay a fixed buy-in to enter an online poker tournament, then play until there’s one winner left, with the top finishers receiving a prize. This is usually cash, but can also include entry to another, bigger tournament, hotel stays, flights, merchandise and more.
In order to make it to the end, you have to win as many chips as possible. You can do this by having the best hand at showdown, or by betting enough that your opponents fold. If you bet with a hand that you know isn’t very strong, and your opponent folds, you’ve won the hand with a bluff.
There are many different types of poker tournament, including regular MTTs, freerolls, satellites, turbos, hypers, bounties and more. Tournaments are also held across all sorts of games, including Hold’em, Omaha, Short Deck and Stud.
Pros and Cons of Online Poker Tournaments
Poker tournaments are excellent for big guarantees and turning a small buy-in into a big pay out, but you also need to weather a lot of variance and be mentally prepared for one hand to end your run.
To help you choose between cash games and tourneys, we’ve put together a quick overview of the main pros and cons of online poker tournaments:
Pros
- You get 24/7 access to hundreds of MTTs
- Buy-ins are suitable for all bankrolls
- Prize pools can be worth over $12.5 million
- There are plenty of satellites for big events
- Lots of weak players
- You can play freeroll poker tournaments online
Cons
- High level of variance
- Tournaments can last hours before making the money
- Bad luck can have a massive impact on how much you win
- Not all players like increasing blinds
- Unlike cash games, you’re locked in until the tournament ends
Different Types of Poker Tournaments
When you open the tournament schedule at an online poker site, you’ll usually see a wide variety of options including free-to-play tournaments, fast-paced events, and tourneys where you get an instant cash prize for knocking out your opponents.
Here are some of the formats you’ll see at the best poker sites for tournaments:
MTTs
MTT stands for multi-table tournament, and it covers almost every type of online poker tournament which has at least two tables. So, most of the categories covered her – like freerolls, satellites and PKOs – are all a type of MTT.
Nearly all of the tournaments you’ll find in a poker lobby will be MTTs. An MTT has a specific start time. It’s best to sign up before it starts, although you can usually jump in later during a period called ‘late reg’. This will often last an hour, maybe more. Just bear in mind that some players will already have bigger chip stacks by the time you join, and the blind will have gone up.
You pay a fixed fee to join an MTT and receive a certain amount of chips in return. For example, you might pay $11 to enter and get 10,000 chips. These chips don’t have any real value, like they would in a cash game. Instead, your aim is to grow your stack and last as long as possible to finish in the money, or ‘ITM’.
Most MTTs pay out the top 15-20% of finishers. The biggest prizes are reserved for those at the top. You play an MTT until you lose all of your chips – or until you have every chip in play, and win the whole thing.
Prize pools can range from a few bucks to literally millions, so it’s impossible to nail down the term ‘MTT’ as one kind of tourney. There are all sorts of formats, lengths, blind structures, and more.
Sit & Gos
Also known as SNGs, these are online poker tournaments that begin the moment they have enough players. These are often single-table games with two, six or nine players. So, if you join a $22 9-handed SNG, it only begins when the ninth player registers.
Sit & Gos are great for training and learning to adjust at different stages of a tournament, because they follow predictable, repetitive structures. For example, if you play a nine-handed SNG with turbo blinds, you know it should be wrapped up in an hour or less. You should be cautious in the early stages, and get more aggressive towards the end as blinds increase.
Sit & Gos don’t have to be limited to one table, though. A lot of top poker sites have SNGs with 18, 36, 90 or 180 players. If you sign up to one and it’s taking too long to start, you can simply unregister to receive your buy-in back right away.
Freerolls
As the name suggests, freerolls are tournaments that you can join for free. You’ll find them at the best sites for poker tournaments, and they are a great way to gain some experience if you’re a beginner.
There’s zero risk since you aren’t using your funds to join. And even seasoned players can try freerolls to test different poker strategies.
Of course, you won’t find the biggest prizes here, but you could potentially find options that pay a few hundred dollars. More commonly, freerolls will reward you with tournament tickets, allowing you to join larger MTTs without spending a buy-in.
Satellites
Satellite poker tournaments are essentially pathways to larger online MTTs or even live events. Instead of offering a cash prize, you’ll get tickets for large buy-in tournaments.
For example, if you place in a $5 satellite, you’ll get a ticket for a tournament with a $500 buy-in. So instead of spending hundreds of dollars of your own money, you’re essentially getting access to a large prize pool tourney for $5.
You’ll often find multi-step satellites on the best sites for online poker tournaments, which could eventually lead to taking part in multi-million-dollar online and live tournaments.
Turbo and Hyper Tournaments
Turbo and Hyper tournaments are ideal if you don’t want to spend all day playing a single tourney. These tournaments are fast-paced with blinds that increase rapidly after fixed durations, sometimes as quickly as every five minutes.
Turbo poker tournaments have faster blinds that a standard event, typically increasing every five minutes. Hypers are faster still, and usually have rapid blind increases every three minutes.
With a fixed starting stack and increasing blinds, you’ll need to adopt a more aggressive strategy, as time can run out quickly. Sites with the best online poker tournaments offer a variety of hyper and turbo tournaments every day.
Bounty and PKO Tournaments
Some of the best online poker tournaments for real money put bounties on everyone’s head. As soon as you eliminate a player, you instantly win their bounty – whether you’re deep ITM, or it’s literally the first hand of the tournament.
In regular bounty tournaments, the value of a player’s bounty remains fixed. But, in a Progressive Knockout (PKO), the bounties gradually increase as the tournament progresses.
The usual format in PKOs is that you knock a player out and receive a portion of their bounty as cash, and the other portion is added to your bounty. As the tournament runs deep, these bounties can grow to huge levels. Statistically, it’s often the correct play to call even when you know you’re behind in the latter stages, which is why you’ll see so many crazy all-ins late on.
With all bounty tournaments, it’s the player who wins the final chip that collects the bounty. So, if a player has 3,000 chips and you win 2,999, you won’t win an instant cash prize. It’ll be whoever takes that last chip that collects the cash. That’s why it’s really important to assess your stack size relative to each opponent at the table at the start of every hand.
Series and Signature Events
Finally, we have the biggest of the lot, the signature poker events. These are the best online poker tournaments for real money if you’re after giant prize pools. Many sites feature annual or biannual signature events with huge, often multi-million-dollar prize pools.
These events usually have a series of interconnected tournaments, with the winning players from each day or tournament climbing the ladder to the ultimate final table. One of the most popular online poker tournament events is ACR Poker’s Venom series, which boasts a seven-figure prize pool.
The skill level is understandably a lot higher here, so we wouldn’t recommend these for beginners. The buy-ins are also relatively high, around $ 5,000 or more, unless you’ve used satellites to qualify for these MTTs.
Best Bonuses for Tournament Players
The best poker sites for tournaments offer high-value offers such as welcome bonuses, rakeback, and free tournament tickets. These bonuses are the best way to keep your bankroll in shape when advancing beyond the bubble proves difficult.
Here are the bonuses you should look out for if you play poker online tournaments:
Welcome Bonus
The top offshore poker sites are home to the best online poker tournaments and, unsurprisingly, the biggest welcome bonuses.
Welcome bonuses are the window to an online poker site’s promotional prowess, so big deposit multipliers are always preferable. The two types of deposit bonuses to look out for are:
- Match Deposit Bonus: The amount of bonus cash you receive is equal to the value of your deposit.
- Non-Matched Deposit Bonus: The amount of bonus you receive is a multiple of your deposit, e.g., a 50% reload bonus means the bonus is worth half the value of your deposit.
Tournament Tickets
In addition to first deposit bonuses, our favorite places to play free online poker tournaments give new customers tickets. These tickets can be used to enter real-money tournaments without spending a cent.
Anyone who wants to get maximum value from the best poker tournaments online should be on the lookout for ticket bonuses.
Free ticket bonuses cover the entry fee for specific tournaments. For example, BetOnline gives new customers tickets for a selection of Step Satellite tournaments that feed into the $100,000 Sunday Showdown.
The main types of free poker tournament tickets you can get are:
- Free satellite tickets
- Free Sunday major tickets
- Free weekly MTT tickets
- Free SNG tickets
No Deposit Bonus
You don’t always need to deposit cash to claim bonuses. Sign-up bonuses are a type of no-deposit offer given to newbies who successfully complete the registration process.
Loyalty rewards are another type of no-deposit bonus, as are birthday rewards. Basically, if you don’t need to use a poker site’s cashier page to get a reward, it’s a no-deposit bonus.
VIP Rewards
Loyalty counts in poker, which is why the top offshore operators give you rewards based on the amount of rake you generate.
In cash tournaments online, you pay a rake (a small fee) each time you buy in and enter tournaments. Rake can earn you points at certain poker sites like BetOnline and Ignition.
These points are used to determine your VIP status, which in turn unlocks rewards such as bonus cash, tournament tickets, and exclusive prizes.
Most Popular Online Poker Tournament Games
Almost all of the best online poker events are Hold’em showdowns. But as you’ll see when you browse the weekly tournament schedules, there are other ways to play.
Apart from Texas Hold’em, the best online poker tournaments offering real money prizes are Omaha poker rooms.
What’s important to note is that those aren’t the only two variants in town. Poker comes in a variety of flavors, and each one has its own format. But mastering Hold’em and Omaha will put you in the best position to succeed—whether you’re competing live at the WSOP or playing online.
To help get you off on the right foot, here are the basics of Hold’em and Omaha, the main types of tournaments available, and a few poker strategy tips.
Texas Hold’em
Texas Hold’em is played with two hole cards and five community cards. You have the option to use one, two, or none of your hole cards in conjunction with those on the board to make the best five-card poker hand.
Hold’em can be played as Limit, Pot Limit, or No Limit. Finally, the best online poker tournaments include events covering these formats:
Omaha
Omaha is an all-action poker variant in which everyone receives four hole cards. You must use two of the four cards in conjunction with three of the five community cards to make a five-card poker hand.
These rules, along with the fact that games are primarily Pot Limit, mean you’ve got more ways to make hands in Omaha than Hold’em. This creates more action and volatility.
As it is with Hold’em, the best online poker tournaments for Omaha fans come in different formats. Freezeouts are common, but given the volatile nature of Omaha, you get a lot more rebuys and re-entry tournaments.
Supported Payment Methods at Poker Tournament Sites
Our tip for playing online poker tournaments is to use crypto, as it allows near-instant cash-outs with low fees and no banks to block your withdrawals. But there are plenty of other options if crypto isn’t your preference.
Here are the available payment methods when you play online poker tournaments for real money:
Online Bank Transfer
You can send money directly from your bank account to a variety of offshore poker sites. You can also request withdrawals using this method.
Generally, deposits are processed instantly, but withdrawals may take up to seven business days. Fees aren’t usually an issue, but you might run into issues with some US banks not authorizing payments to offshore poker companies.
Debit and Credit Cards
Most people who play poker tournaments online use a debit or credit card for deposits. They’re familiar, safe, and don’t incur fees. Debit cards can also be used for withdrawals, with an average processing time of two days.
eWallets
Digital wallets, aka eWallets, are the fastest way to make deposits and withdrawals outside of cryptocurrencies. That’s because they’re peer-to-peer payment systems that don’t rely on legacy banking protocols.
Withdrawals via eWallets such as Luxon are usually completed within 24 hours. The only slight downside to eWallets at our recommended poker tournament sites is that platforms such as PayPal aren’t available.
Cryptocurrencies
The safest and most efficient way to join the best online poker tournaments for real money is by using cryptocurrency. And, these days, a lot of the best poker sites for tournaments accept crypto coins including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT.
They’re processed via decentralized blockchains, which means transactions aren’t verified by an intermediary. Instead, cryptography is used to ensure all transactions are safe and legit. The end result is that cryptocurrency transactions are extremely fast. Not only that, they’re anonymous and universal.
That means you can make instant and anonymous deposits and withdrawals using a universal currency from anywhere in the world.
A Quick Look at the Best Sites for Online Poker Tournaments
Our Verdict
It doesn’t matter how big your bankroll is or where you live; there are plenty of poker tournaments online. We recommend starting with freerolls if you’re a novice and building a bankroll that way.
If you’ve been playing for a while, check out the low- and mid-stakes MTTs on sites such as CoinPoker. Then, when you’re ready, step up to the big leagues and play for $1 million prizes in events such as Venom on ACR Poker.
