Poker Tournaments is become very very popular. It's on television, on the Internet, in homes all over the world and probably at your local charity function. But people aren't just playing poker; they're playing a particular structured form of poker: the poker tournament. Those of us who have been playing poker for ten years or more probably don't remember any mention of any kind of "tournament" at their regular Thursday night game. Yet today, it is probably the preferred form of poker and with the growing popularity of televised poker tournaments, the way most new player are learning to play poker. So where did these poker tournaments come from and how did they become so popular?
Poker tournaments as we know them did not exist before 1970. What did exist was something called a "freeze-out." What a freeze-out meant was that the players, often just two, referred to as a "heads-up freeze-out," would come to the table with a prescribed amount of money, no more, no less and they would play, with scheduled breaks if necessary, until one player had all the money.
In 1970 Benny Binion, owner of Binion's Horseshoe Casino, hosted a heads-up marathon between two famous poker players, Nick "The Greek" Dandalos and Johnny Moss. Following the popularity of this event, Binion invited the best poker players in the world to compete in a series of poker games, with the group voting for the champion at the end. Johnny Moss was selected that year. The following year, a freeze-out was used to determine the champion (Moss again). This freeze-out became what is now known as the main event of the World Series of Poker. The tournament format proved popular and other Poker tournaments began to crop up, starting with Amarillo's "Super Bowl of Poker" in 1979 and expanding from there.
The first World Series of Poker No Limit Hold 'em championship event in 1971 had six players. In 2005, The Championship event had a whopping 5600 players! In 1971, the $10,000 buy-in main event of the World Series was the only poker tournament of its kind; today, multiple 10,000 dollar events can be found every month. So what happened? A number of events contributed to the massive boom poker tournaments are now experiencing.
The first big innovation was the decision in 1978 to structure the tournament payout so that the tournament was no longer winner-take-all. It's unlikely 5600 or even 56 people would be willing to put up $10,000 dollars if they knew only one person was going to walk away with any money. Today's tournaments are usually structured for multiple payouts, so that about ten percent of the players get some money, 34-37 percent goes to the winner and a rapidly decreasing percentage gets distributed to each successive player.
The next and probably most important contribution to the history of tournament poker is the introduction of the "satellite" tournament. While Eric Drache was running the World Series of Poker for the Binion family in the 1970s, he noticed a number of players in side games who did not appear willing or able to put up $10,000 for the main event, playing in a game where there was $10,000 on the table among them. Drache suggested they play a freeze-out for the whole thing, with the winner playing in the main event. Thus the satellite tournament was born. In a satellite tournament, a group of players put up a certain amount, about ten percent of the entry fee to a larger tournament and play a freeze-out, with the winner then having the money to play in the larger poker tournament.