Satellite Tournaments

The biggest tournaments online and live are very expensive. A buy-in for the huge Sunday tournaments online will easily set you back several hundred dollars, and the biggest live tournaments like WPT, WSOP and EPT are in a league of their own. Buying a seat in one of those will cost you $10,000 or more.

That kind of money is not exactly what you'll find in your pocket on an everyday basis. At least not if you are like most poker players are.
Luckily there's another and far cheaper way to get into the big tournaments with a shot at the enormous prize. This is where Satellite tournaments – or just Satellites – come in.

Satellites can be played in the form of Sit and Go tournaments or Multitable tournaments, but unlike normal poker tournaments you don't win cash if you place high in a Satellite. You win a seat in a buy-in to a bigger online tournament or live event.

The big Sunday tournament on Full Tilt Poker, the "$750K Guaranteed", has a guaranteed prize pool of at least $750,000 each week, and the first prize alone is never less than $187,500. Those Sundays a year when the prize pool is guaranteed at a whopping $1,000,0000 the first prize is more than $250,000.
This kind of tournament is a great example on how Satellites work.

If you want to buy-in to the "$750K Guaranteed", the buy-in is $216 of which $200 goes directly into the prize pool and the remaining $16 is the fee you pay Full Tilt Poker to play – also known as rake. When it's a $1,000,000 guarantee, you need to find $535 for the buy-in. To most people that kind of money is not just something you fork out without a second thought.
This is where the Satellite comes into play, and at Full Tilt Poker the Satellites offer you a chance to win your way into one of these huge tournaments for as little as $2.25

The whole thing is pretty simple. You find a Satellite and buy-in for $2.25. In this Satellite the top 10% will win a seat in another and bigger Satellite. This means that if 10 players participate in the Satellite, one player goes through to win a seat, and if 200 participate there are 20 seats up for grabs.
If you make it through the first Satellite and progress to the next one – again one in each ten players will win. This time prizes are buy-ins for the Sunday "$750K Guaranteed" tournament worth $216 each.

So the road to the gold goes through two Satellite tournaments. In both tournaments you have to place in the top 10% to progress, and when you do you'll have gained entrance to a tournament worth $216 for just $2.25. That's good business.

The potential in Satellites became clear to everyone in the world, when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main Event and $2.5 million back in 2004 after qualifying for the event in a $40 Satellite tournament online.


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