If you have a small gambling budget then pokie tournaments are a great way of getting more action out of your money. While it is rare to find tournaments for pokies at traditional gaming venues there are a wide selection of slot tournaments available at online casinos. This article covers all you need to know about playing in slot tournaments.
How Pokies Tournaments Work
To enter a tournament you pay a buy-in fee. You then get a set amount of time to play and a set amount of credits to play with. You spin the reels as usual however instead of winning money you win points. The player with the highest amount of points at the end of the tournament wins the top prize. In most tournaments there are prizes for many more positions than just first.
Advantages of Slot Tournaments
There are some clear advantages to playing in a tournament. These include that fact that you have a set buy-in amount, you are guaranteed to get a certain amount of spin time for your money and you have a better chance of winning.
The reason you have a better chance of winning is that you are playing against other players rather than the house. So for example if you have a tournament with 500 players and a $5 buy-in you have a $2,500 prize pool. If the top prize is $1,500 you have a 1 in 500 chance of winning $1,500 for just a $5 buy-in. The chances of winning this much with $5 during regular play is clearly much lower.
Where to play Pokie Tournaments
Currently the best tournaments are held at online casinos that use Microgaming software. Check out our Top Online Casinos section for our list of recommended Microgaming casinos. You will find a variety of tournament types and buy-in amounts. Tournament games include popular online pokies like Hitman, Thunderstruck, Tomb Raider, Loaded and Avalon.
How much can you win playing tournaments?
The prize pools available for most of the tournaments vary from between $50 and $20,000. Microgaming has run two special tournaments known as the Grand Slam of Slots. The first tournament had a prize pool of over $1,500,000 with a first prize of $1,000,000.
The Grand Slot of Slots II had an even bigger prize pool of $2,430,000. Clearly these big tournaments are not happening everyday but as you can see there is some serious money to be won playing slot tournaments online.
Slot Tournaments Tips and Strategies
We always like to give our visitors the best chance of winning so here are some quick tips.
- Once you start you cannot pause the timer so make sure you have time to play
- Spin the reels as fast as possible
- Don’t wait for wins to count up – click the screen to stop the win count