Turbo Poker Tournaments

Turbo Poker Tournaments are great if you don't like the pain of sitting for four hours or more at freerolls or regulartournaments. The blinds are fast and furious and the action is frantic! 

The idea is that the blinds are raised a lot more frequently than most of the other poker tournaments that you play online. Where in "normal" tournaments the blinds might be raised every twelve or fifteen minutes, the blinds in turbo poker tournaments get raised as fast as every three minutes in some cases! This means that you need to have your wits about you at all times and you must play your good hands strongly.

A lot of Turbo tournaments have rebuys, because the nature of having to play as quickly means that often there are more mistakes than normal speed tournaments so there is often the opportunity to buy back in. Instead of the standard 60 minutes before the rebuy, Turbo poker tournament rebuy games usually break after just 30 minutes.

Turbo poker tournaments have one big advantage going for them - they are quick! Sometimes it can get very frustrating sitting for hours on end playing the regular poker tournaments and freerolls, turbos are MUCH faster. 

Hyper-Turbo Tournaments
In Hyper-turbos the blind levels increase very fast, faster even than standard turbo tournaments. Each round usually lasts three minutes before the blinds increase and the starting chips are normally 300 chips or less, a lot lower than any other tournaments.

2X Turbo and 3X Turbo Tournaments
2X Turbo tournament means a turbo rebuy tournament where the levels increase at turbo speed but at the same time the rebuy interval time is twice as long as a normal turbo rebuy. 3X Turbos have three times as lon a rebuy time.

One of the best turbo poker tournaments around for the low stakes poker players among you is the Poker Stars $1.50 + $0.25 tourney. There are dozens of these every day and as well as no limits holdem, there's limit and pot limit too and also Omaha and Stud poker. The tournaments start as soon as there are 18 players registered, which in the case of low limits Texas Holdem is every two or three minutes. 

I have played the low limits Texas Holdem regularly over the last few days (November 2005) and have found that I've been getting EXCELLENT returns on my stakes. In the last four days I've played one tournament each day and my results have been: 1st, 2nd, 1st and 3rd! Here's the emails I've had from Poker Stars confirming my tournament placings, (I've changed my name and the tournament numbers to protect myself from poker sharks!)

That's a consistent return and let me tell you it was VERY easy. I'm not about to go and pick up the keys for my new Porsche with the proceeds, but isn't it better to be winning regularly than losing? Each of the turbo poker tournaments took less than an hour to play, about half the time a regular game would have taken.

There's a simple strategy for winning these tournaments that I've used successfully - just sit tight. Play only when you get a big hand and don't get too phased if your blinds are running out. Statistically you are bound to get a big hand every now and again, just wait until it happens and get the maximum advantage you can from it.

If you're interested in making steady returns I would urge you to give the freerolls a miss for a night and try out the Poker Stars Turbo poker tournaments. Or even play them both but please DO give the turbo a go.

Then come back and tell me how much you won!