More Praise for the ORT

In my last column, I discussed the two main reasons why online rebuy tournaments (ORTs) are your best daily tournament value:

Reason No. 1: You get the benefit of the "early-exit" phenomenon. About one-fourth of the field will quit during the rebuy period, and they contribute significant dead money to the prize pool.

Reason No. 2: Since there is no juice on the rebuys, a much lower percentage of your overall tournament cost is going to the house.

But it doesn't end there. In this column, I'll give you three more reasons to play ORTs.

Reason No. 3: Many players get extremely wild and loose during the rebuy period.

Since they know they can rebuy if they go broke, you'll see players take all sorts of risks. Usually, at least one player at each table will get overly aggressive with weak hands. If you're lucky, you'll start at a table with two or more of these loose gooses (or are they loose geese?).

Either way, the trick is to maintain your cool. Don't start playing like them. Since they are ramming and jamming during the rebuy period, your best strategy is to sit back and wait for premium cards. If you find a big hand, you can play it aggressively and probably pick off one of the wild gamblers. And if you should happen to get unlucky and lose, you still have the rebuy option available. That is not to say that you should rely on the rebuy option. If you're playing well, you should need to rebuy only as a result of losing after having gone in with the best hand. And from the ORTs I've seen, you'll have plenty of chances during the rebuy period to get your money in with the best of it.

In fact, I've been in several ORTs with players who moved all in before every flop! After getting 1,500 in starting chips, they took the immediate rebuy to give themselves 3,000 in chips. Then they went all in regardless of what they had. If they lost, they simply made a double-rebuy to get back to 3,000, and then pushed again.

With this strategy, they might eventually get lucky and amass enough chips to satisfy them, at which point they can start playing normally again. But usually this strategy requires going through a ridiculous number of rebuys. Such players can often be among the chip leaders when the rebuy period is over, but they usually pay an absurd price for that privilege.

Obviously, the extreme case of an opponent going all in every hand is somewhat rare, but there are definitely players who do this to a lesser extent. They are determined to have a certain amount of chips before the rebuy period is over, and they will overplay their marginal hands, figuring they will either double up or double rebuy. Most of the time, they will end up spending too much money on rebuys compared to the money they stand to win. Also, they don't realize that accumulating chips early in an ORT isn't terribly important. This leads to reason No. 4:

Reason No. 4: Since there are more chips per player, the tournament has more play to it.

In a typical online tournament, everyone starts with 1,500 in chips. In an ORT, let's say that everyone averages a rebuy and an add-on. That means that everyone is effectively starting with 4,500 in chips. The amount of chips in play has tripled, even though the limits still go up at the same rate. That gives you a lot more play for your money, and if you're a skilled, patient player, it should give you a significant advantage.

You could argue that deep-stack tournaments also provide the same advantage, and to a greater extent. However, they don't provide any of the previous favorable things I've mentioned. When deep-stack tournaments start charging a fraction of the rake, with players making repeated all-in overbets, I might consider them a suitable alternative to ORTs.

Reason No. 5: The accounting of the rebuys is precise.

Compared to the other reasons I've outlined, this one is more of an afterthought than anything else, but it should still help to put your mind at ease. As soon as a player rebuys in an ORT, you can go to the tournament lobby and see the number of rebuys increase by one, and the prize pool adjusted by the appropriate amount. At any given time, you can check the total number of rebuys, the total prize pool, and the amount of chips in play.

Contrast this to a land-based tournament, in which you have to hope the tournament director (TD) is keeping an accurate count of the rebuys. I'd like to think that I can trust all TDs, but I also cannot think of an easier way to skim a buck or two than by withholding a rebuy from the prize pool here and there. Even when it's a TD whom I know I can trust, I'm still happy to have a system that eliminates human error.

Are you convinced?

When ORTs first became popular, a significant part of the poker-playing community wanted nothing to do with them. "They are not real tournaments." "The rebuy period is a joke; it's bingo, not poker." "I'd rather buy in just one time and be done with it." I have heard all of these arguments. And while everyone is entitled to his opinion and personal preference, I think it takes a pretty high level of stubbornness not to see the value in ORTs.

As time has gone by, the popularity of ORTs has clearly grown, as witnessed by the massive fields in nightly rebuy tournaments. But there are still plenty of players who haven't discovered their merits. If you're one of them, hopefully I've opened your eyes. In the world of ORTs, there's always room for more players.

Matt Lessinger is the author of The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, available everywhere. You can find other articles of his at www.CardPlayer.com.