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Home / Poker / What is a satellite poker tournament? And why are they good? Your questions answered..

First published in February 2023. Updated in March 2024.

The €10,000 High Roller tournament begins today at EPT Paris. And if the pattern established so far at this event continues, it’s going to be a big one.

As ever, many of the game’s elite were registered right from the start. Stephen Chidwick, Dominik Nitsche, Thomas Mueloecker and Orpen Kisacikoglu were seated with five minutes still to go before the scheduled start time. But there were numerous other players whose challenge began even earlier.

Event #28, which started at 11am, is on the schedule as “€1K Qualifier to #29 EPT High Roller – Win Your Seat @100,000 chips”. This is a feeder tournament to the High Roller — aka a satellite poker tournament.

Rather than taking a cash prize, winners in this event earn a seat to the bigger tournament. Following a well-established route into a tournament that might otherwise he outside their bankroll.

Sometimes called “satellites”, but more often now referred to as “qualifiers“, these tournaments offer the cheap route to a bigger event. Most people who have been around poker for any length of time don’t need this kind of introduction. But for total beginners, here’s an overview of qualifier or satellite tournaments: what they are, why they’re good, and how to play them.

“What are you doing?” a railbird asked Parker “tonkaaaa” Talbot, who was seated at one of the qualifier tables.

“I’m trying to win my seat to the €10K, bro,” Talbot replied. He then suggested to Simon Brandstrom, loitering nearby, that he should sit down to play.

“How could it not be worth it?” Talbot said. And there’s really no sensible answer to that.

Talbot took his seat in the qualifier today

For players of just about any level, it resolutely is worth playing qualifiers. That’s why both Talbot and his Team PokerStars Pro colleague Ben “Spraggy” Spragg were involved this morning.

WHAT IS A SATELLITE POKER TOURNAMENT?

In its most simple terms, a satellite poker tournament allows a player to enter a bigger event for a fraction of the advertised buy-in. In Paris, Spraggy and Tonkaaaa were playing a $1K event for a tournament with an advertised $10K buy-in, and it’s fairly common for a live qualifier to have a buy-in ratio like this — i.e., one-tenth of the cost.

But qualifier tournaments are by no means restricted to the high buy-in events. Satellites run pretty much every minute of every day on the online tables, allowing PokerStars players the chance to qualify for other tournaments.

And sometimes there’s a kind of ladder — or “step” — process whereby you can enter one qualifier with a really low buy-in, which earns you a seat in a slightly bigger event. From there, you can win into another slightly bigger tournament, etc., etc. until you’re in the target tournament.

This is how come there are always players in EPT Main Events, which have a €5,300 buy-in, who have qualified for something like €1. They have won through several steps to earn a seat in the big one.

HOW DO SATELLITE TOURNAMENTS WORK?

In what we might call a “regular” satellite tournament, players pay their buy-in and all the money goes into a prize pool, as usual. Then tournament organisers figure out how many buy-ins into the “target” tournament that prize pool can buy.

For instance, if there were 100 entries into a $1K satellite, there would be $100K in the prize pool. That would give 10 buy-ins to the $10K high roller “target” tournament. (We are deliberately discounting tournament fees for simplicity.)

The poker tournament progresses as usual, with blinds rising and players knocked out. But the tournament would stop when 10 players remained. Each of them would get an equal share of the $100K prize pool — i.e., a $10K entry into the target tournament.

Turn a small bankroll into a big score

In this kind of satellite, there’s no one winner and no escalating payout structure. Players simply either get into the target event or they don’t.

In recent years, satellite format on the EPT has changed slightly with the introduction of the “Win Your Seat @ 100,000 chips” style of event. We’ll take a look at what that means a couple of sections below.

WHY SATELLITES ARE GOOD

Over to Spraggy for the answer to the question of why satellites are good.

“It lets players get in for less than the price of a bigger event,” Spraggy says. “It’s a good way to parlay smaller bankrolls into giant scores, or to get experience if you’re looking to move up a level. Start with a satellite.”

Spraggy admits that he probably won’t play the €10K High Roller if he doesn’t win in through the qualifier. But he knows as well as anybody in the game that poker tournaments have a good deal of variance, and that it’s always worth taking a shot.

Spraggy found his form to make it into the €10K High Roller

You still get the same amount of chips, and you still have the same chance as any of the direct buy-ins. You just paid much less for the privilege. Perhaps you may even have a slight advantage, having got into the swing of things for the day in the smaller event.

“It’s nice to warm-up, get your brain firing a little bit before you take a shot at the event,” Spraggy says. “Even if you’re going to play anyway, you might as well give a satellite a spin first. See if you can get in for 10% of the price.”

THE JOY OF SATELLITE SUCCESS

Never underestimate how worthwhile qualifiers can be. Satellite tournaments have been paving the way to the big time for many years.

Most famously, Chris Moneymaker won a satellite on PokerStars that gave him entry to the $10,000 World Series Main Event in 2003. He won that tournament, along with $2.5 million, and ignited the poker boom. (Greg Raymer also won into the Main Event on PokerStars the following year.)

Players such as Jason Mercier, Mike McDonald and Dominik Panka have won EPT Main Events after winning online satellites. And although we don’t keep records of the players who got into big events via live qualifiers, it’s a safe assumption that many of those have parlayed smaller buy-ins into riches.

The most famous qualifier in the game, Chris Moneymaker

The tournament played by Talbot and Spragg this morning had 141 entries, of $1,125 apiece. After fees, that meant a prize pool of €145,512 — or 14 seats into the €10,300 buy-in High Roller. (The €1,312 “extra” goes to the player missing out on qualification at the very end.)

The High Roller has a single optional re-entry, and obviously satellite qualifiers would have to find that buy-in if they wanted a second crack. But in all likelihood, the tournament will probably get something like 300 entries, and a couple of these satellite qualifiers will cash.

Even a min-cash of something like €18K will represent a very good return on investment on the €1K qualifier buy-in.

‘WIN YOUR SEAT @100,000 CHIPS’

As discussed above, a “regular” satellite tournament plays out essentially the same as any other poker tournament, with the only difference that it ends when there are few enough players left to win through to the target event.

But more recently, qualifiers on the EPT have been played using the “Win Your Seat @ xxxx chips” format, with the xxxx usually representing a figure of 10x a starting stack. These are also called “Target Stack” qualifiers.

This format really as as simple as it sounds. Players play the event as normal, attempting to build a stack. When they hit that target amount, they immediately qualify for the target event. They get their ticket and head over to the other tournament. Tournament officials take the 100,000 chips out of play.

“It’s a much more action-heavy format,” Spraggy says of this style of qualification tournament. (He echoes Dara O’Kearney, who wrote “A satellite expert’s view on the ‘target stack’ tournament format” for PokerStars Blog.

Solving some satellite issues

It solves many of the issues of other satellite events.

In the “regular” satellite poker tournament, a player might build an enormous stack early on and then they would need to do nothing else but just sit around and wait for the tournament to play out around them. They would be disincentivised to play any hands, and may even want to walk away from the table. (Or, worse, there may be an incentive to give chips away to friends — a kind of collusion.)

The qualifier tournament, foreground, with the €10K behind

On the other hand, short stacks could be incentivised to take their time and hope that others get knocked out. It encourages the kind of stalling that can happen on the bubble in any event.

“These are very different to a regular satellite,” Spraggy says. “There’s going to be a lot less stalling, a lot less people folding, folding, folding into the event.”

Target stack events require players to actually play: take their spots and build a stack, knowing that if they hit the magic number, it’s job done.

The tournaments still shrink as with any other event. Players are knocked out and lose their chance at qualification, but others hit the 100K and they’re off.

In the case of the $10K today at EPT Paris, that requires just a stroll to the other side of the tournament room and a seat in the neighbouring event. And let’s give the final word to Spraggy on the subject, who recently tweeted:

More about EPT Paris:

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