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tournament’s winners. No portion of the administration fee is
included in the prize fund, and the entire prize fund is
dispersed to winning participants. The buy-in may or may not
correlate dollar-for-dollar with the amount of chips received at
the start of the tournament, and the chips themselves have no
intrinsic monetary value. Although “re-buys” are sometimes
allowed, tournament play contemplates that each player has only a
fixed number of chips and that each player begins the tournament
with the same number of chips. When a player runs out of chips,
he or she is out of the game. Cash prizes are awarded to a
predetermined number of finishing places in the tournament.
Because of the buy-in system, the only monetary loss a tournament
participant may incur will be the amount of the buy-ins and any
re-buys the participant might make; no participant will be able
to bet--or subsequently lose--any greater amount. Similar to
live-action poker, however, a player’s tournament success depends
on a combination of both luck and skill.3 A player might have a
decent hand, but as Kenny Rogers tells us in “The Gambler”, he or
she would still have to “know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold
‘em, know when to walk away and know when to run” to actually be
a success.
3 A court in England recently had the opportunity to decide
whether Texas Hold ‘Em was a game of chance or a game of skill,
and the jury decided on the former. See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6267603.stm.
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Last modified: May 25, 2011