In this article, we will cover all the aspects of late registration in poker tournaments. When it comes to playing poker in a tournament setting, getting into a position of strength is vital. Tournaments with no Late Registration that start with about 25-30 players will have a Guarantee of up to 30 times the entry, whereas the same tournament with Late Registration would have a Guarantee of 50-60 times the entry. Is Late Registration an advantage? There has been much discussion, including Replay Poker’s own forum. Playing It Hard: A Good Late Game Strategy in Multi-table Poker Tournaments. The different participants of multi-table poker tournaments may find it somehow helpful to play very tight during the early stages. This will help them build a good reputation as a solid and respectable poker player. You can check in the tournament lobby the number of levels during which late registration is authorized. The duration of late registration varies depending on the structure of the tournament you want to participate in. A qualification tournament cannot end while late registration is still in progress. Late Registration SNGs, Cash Time Banks, Multi-Entry Tournaments Coming to iPoker New October update will add extra tournament types and new software features. IPoker 's forthcoming poker client upgrade, planned to roll out during October, includes a slate of new features and a couple of online poker innovations, pokerfuse has learned.
Late registration into poker tournaments is a relatively recent innovation. Pokerstars started offering this a couple of years ago, with the other sites adding the ability to join a tournament which is already running one-by-one after this.
Today you can register late in a tournament at most poker sites. There are some obvious benefits, no more frustration of missing your favorite game due to a 5 minute delay, and no more having to pre-register to make sure you were in – only to get delayed and blind away.
Poker sites are laughing, they have many more players in each game thanks to the late reg. While this sounds great on paper, from the players perspective it can be a negative. I have joined tournaments with a few hundred people registered myself – only an hour later to realize that the field grew to 2,000 or more and that this was going to be one very late night!
I’ll look at pros and cons of late tournament registration below.
For me the single biggest positive is that you can choose from many more tournaments in your preferred buy-in / game combination when you sit down to play. You not only have the ones about to start at various sites, you’ll have all the ones which started in the last hour (can be longer) too. Sure, the current blind levels might be a little high in some games – however your choice should be expanded, which can only be a good thing.
I already mentioned those times you might have missed your games by 5 minutes, the later registration takes the stress away from getting to your computer… and that extra few minutes invested in chatting with the family or other-half could be the difference between a good weekend and a great one!! You do not have to pre-register for bigger games (for example the big Sunday tournaments at various sites) to avoid the risk of missing the start nowadays either - I have lost buy-ins before now when real-life got in the way!
With bigger fields the prize pools are bigger too. Of course this has its own caveats (see below). However big prizes are always a ‘pro’ my mind.
The main negative for me is uncertainty about the size of the field. Sometimes we all get a little tired and just do not feel like fighting through fields of several 1000 players… in which case there is an element of ‘gamble’ in registering for an unknown game where there is late registration. Guess I should join the 180 SNGs with all the 12-tabling nits under these circumstances instead!
There used to be opportunities for ‘overlays’ in poker tournaments. Situations where the prize pool was bigger than the sum of buy-ins (meaning free prize money for the entrants!) With late registration any significant overlay is displayed for all to see, and will quickly disappear as enterprising players take advantage.
My final con is more of a dilemma. When the blinds are very high, as in 7% of your stack or more then you will need to gamble quickly with your stack after joining late. In the case of turbo tournaments this is fairly common. When the blinds are small, no problem – it is in that middle-zone of 20 to 25 big blind stacks that joining late becomes a more difficult decision. My perspective is that good players, who can make the adjustments quickly and get fast reads / make assessments of their opponents, can get away with this. Beginners and those still improving their tournament game could well be better off joining late only when the blinds are smaller (say 25 / 50 max). This leaves more opportunity to understand the flow of your table or to hit a big hand and build those chips ready for a deep run.
On balance these are a good innovation, with some sites now expanding them beyond the usual 1 hour I wonder if things will end up getting out of hand… though the blind increases should put a cap on how long late reg can go on for. I remember vividly missing my favorite games by 2 minutes and the frustration this used to bring – so the uncertain field sizes are not such a big price to pay.
A more important factor came to my attention just the other night. I played tournaments at PokerStars and Titan Poker at the same time – and the difference in experience level and general strategy understanding was huge.
PokerStars attract a lot of poker enthusiasts, making the level of play generally good. While Titan are part of the network of sports-betting sites (iPoker) who cater for regular people crossing over into the poker room for entertainment and leisure. If you have not seen the difference in the number of players seeing the flop, willingness to go all-in with bad 1-pair type hands and crazy bet sizing then I recommend you take a look at Titan Poker for yourself very soon.
I am proud to offer SNG Planet readers $20 extra cash at Titan, on top of your 200% welcome match. Simply register with bonus code SNGPLANET and I will make sure the extra cash is paid direct to your player account within 48 hours – check out Titan Poker for yourself now!
Today I am going to look at the $15 buy-in 100 seat Mega Satellites that are running every night on PokerStars, as those are the cheapest direct routes into the Million.
The target tournament has a $215 buy-in, which means for $15, assuming you do not re-enter, then one in 14 players will win seat, assuming there is no overlay (more on that in a second). You start with 3,000 chips in this satellite and the average stack size would be 14 times that on the bubble, so 42,000 chips. This means that if you have a stack of 42,000 or more and you are close to the bubble, you can for the most part lock up and fold your way to the money. You definitely should avoid any needless confrontations with stacks similar to yours in size, because you can only lose at this point. That includes potentially folding Pocket Aces preflop (we cover when you should and should not do that in detail in the book).
In reality, you can start to tighten up before 42,000 chips, because when you get to the bubble the stacks sizes will be spread out. There will be monster stacks and micro stacks, few players will have an average stack. In our book we advocate aiming to get to 70% of the average cash stack then tightening up, so 30,000 in this case, but in mega satellites where 100+ seats are on offer, you might get away with even smaller than that.
If there is an overlay, wait till the late registration period ends, look at the total number of chips and divide that by 100 (because there are 100 seats guaranteed), and that is your average cash stack. So if there are 3 million chips in play, the average stack would be 30,000 and you can probably start to tighten up at 24,000.
Speaking of late registration, you can register late until 1 hour and 45 minutes. This is important to note in satellites. That would get you to the 200/400 level, or 7.5 big blinds. While that is a massive chip disadvantage, it is instantly profitable from an ICM perspective to late register a satellite. You don’t even need to do a complex calculation to see the sense in this. Let’s say 1,400 players enter the satellite you are playing, 800 of them might have been eliminated by the end of late registration. Now instead of outlasting 1,300 players to win one of those 100 seats, you only have to outlast 700.