There is no doubt that poker tournaments offer players the opportunity to win life changing sums of money in a very short time frame. Whether it is live poker tournaments or online poker tournaments then the effect can be the same. If you are playing in your local re-buy event and manage to win it and pocket £20,000 then this could also be a life changing sum of money.

If that amount of money enabled you to pay off your debts and even buy that motor car that you previously couldn’t afford then the effect can be deemed to have been “life changing” to a certain degree. Imagine then what the situation is if you pick up something like $100k or $250k.

You do not need to win millions on the lottery for something to be life changing and poker tournaments do give you the potential for an instant hit. This is why many players are looking to play poker tournaments full-time. My own preference has been to play cash games but I certainly do not shun playing poker tournaments as a way to make money.

Poker tournaments come in all shapes and sizes but if you want to turn pro and play full-time then you are going to have to play at a decent level. Many players manage to play on the poker tournament circuit by selling pieces of themselves or having a sponsor or other financial backers.

These are all viable ways to play poker tournaments without it having to cost you an arm and a leg to fund them yourself. So how many buy-ins do you need in order to play large MTT poker tournaments? Well I would certainly start the bidding at 100 as a minimum. The variance in poker tournaments is very severe and this is even more so with online poker tournaments.

Of course it should go without saying that you should have the game capable of winning a poker tournament. You need to have a very good grasp of tournament poker concepts and blind to stack ratios and how they correlate with continually changing poker tournament dynamics.

So I would advise that if you were considering playing in $100 poker tournaments then having at least $10,000 in your bankroll would be the way to go. You would also need other expenses as well and that would mean having at least six months living expenses so you are not under pressure to succeed immediately. Ideally you should already have had some good success at the type of poker tournaments that you are looking to play full-time in.

There is no point in playing poker tournaments for a living if you are not good enough. Many players have made this leap based on insufficient evidence and a few fluked results. So you should have had some good results and you should have a good feel as to whether or not you really do have an angle in poker tournaments or whether or not you have merely got lucky.

You will need an aggressive game and especially for fast structured events but if you have the game and the bankroll and the nerve to handle losing runs then why not give it a shot.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson