Here in the final installment of my free 8-Part Successful Online Poker Strategies E-course.  If you have enjoyed the lessons I have sent to you, please go to www.internetpokercoach.com and purchase my ebook which will be immediately delivered to you and is in an easy to read format.

In this last Lesson, I am going to cover larger online tournaments that are available to you. These are the tournaments that so many of you have heard of. Most sites offer a plethora of larger-entrant tourneys with anywhere from a couple of hundred people playing to 22,500 on PokerStars Sunday $100k tournament.

In addition, most all site offer satellites to the WSOP as well as some other pro tournaments. These satellites are a great way to try and gain entry to a major tournament like the WSOP Main Event. You can conceivably make it into these tournaments by spending nothing or a small fraction of the amount you would normally pay for a buy in. Let's face it, most people are not going to plunk down $10,000 to play in the Main Event. But, winning a satellite for a couple hundred dollars or less is very possible.

If you win or place within a certain number of top finishers (depending on the tournament) the poker site will pay your entry into a major tournament. Not a bad deal at all. PokerStars currently offers a great number of tournaments that can land you in the WSOP Main Event, a prize package valued at $12,500. ($10,000 entry fee paid and $2,500 cash!) Full Tilt, Bodog, pretty much all the major sites offer similar packages as well, but PokerStars probably send the most players to the Main Event.

If Satellites do not interest you, there are a number of other tournaments going on every day at various sites that sign up a large number of entrants and pay out a large amount of cash.

For example, PokerStars has one of the best deals going, where $11 entry gets you into a tournament on Sundays. This tourney is guaranteed to pay out at least $100k in prize money. The "kicker" is, there are now 22,500 entrants, so you have just a little bit of competition. The top 3500 are awarded prize money (which is always above your entry fee, how much above depends on how high you finish) with the winner netting around $20k!

As you can probably see, these tournaments offer a great amount of gain, but they are hard to win, and sometimes hard to place in the money. Remember, the more players, the more luck will become involved and the harder it is to win money. My book, the No B.S. Guide to Winning Online No Limit Texas Hold'em will show you how to finish in the money the majority of the time, but to actually win one of these tourneys with several thousand players takes both skill and luck!

The first thing you need to do is learn how to pick the tournaments you will enter. You can enter tourneys from $.10 entry fee to $200+$16 if you like. Obviously you will have to decide you much money you want to spend to enter various tournaments, but it has been my experience that the great the dollar amount of the entry fee, the better players you will face. However, that can be to the good, because these players will take it more seriously and you are less likely to have your pocket Aces cracked by some idiot going all-in with A-3 and hitting a set of 3's on the Flop!

Many people at lower level tournaments do not take the game seriously because it didn't cost much to enter. Therefore, they are likely to do things like go all-in every single hand, (I have seen that many times. Their goal is to build a big stack by dumb luck or bust out quickly) or play any combination of stupid starting hands. Hands like 9-2 suited and J-9 off suit are a great starting hand to many players in such tournaments.

What this means to you is that you need to have a lot of patience in the these big tournaments. Don't let other players loose play affect you. These are long tournaments that cannot be won in the initial stages. They can certainly be lost however.

Just because other players are going all-in with hands like Q-T doesn't mean you have to. They are just trying to double up, but even if they do, they will lose their chips later on, well before they make the money, trying the same thing over again Recognize this fact and just wait until you have premium cards and then punish them.

These types of hyper-loose players are actually great to have at your table, as they will surrender their chips to you at some point. Even if they luck out a few times, the odds will catch up to them. Seldom do these players even last long enough to make the money.

The best way to play large tournaments and combat loose players is by simply avoiding going all-in pre-flop. Wait until you have seen the flop if at all possible and call those big raises from there. If you didn't hit the Flop, get out of the hand early on in a big tournament. Remember, others may be in the hand with cards they shouldn't be, so even if it looks like no one probably hit the Flop, many times someone did simply because they played a hand that they should not have. Be able to shut down your A-K post-flop if it didn't hit.

The other thing you can do to punish aggressive players at your table is to see the Flop anytime you have a pocket pair. Most times, this is the best way to beat someone that is going all-in or making big raises when they shouldn't. Your pocket pair will actually hold up over 50% of the time if you are against a single other player after the flop. If you hit your set, you are in the perfect position to take all the other player's chips.

Remember, it is a long tournament, you can afford to be choosy early on and mostly play the Flops that you hit instead of wasting your chips when you don't. This will not only win you pots, but save you a lot of money over the long haul and put you in a position to make the money while all the loose players have fallen along the wayside.  To really get a leg up on your competitors in these tournaments, please purchase my book at the special limited time price of $19.97... Promo code IPC-EBOOK10 is set to expire soon which currently gives you the discounted price from $29.97.

Sincerely,

Chris Wilcox
InternetPokerCoach.com