Poker formats explained: cash, tournaments, bounties, rebuys, Spins and All In or Fold

Fixed blinds, chips worth their face value, buy in for what you like within the table's limits, leave when you want. The room takes a few percent of each pot up to a cap. This is the format for a player with an hour to spare and the one where a win rate is easiest to measure, in big blinds per 100 hands. Both rooms have Hold'em cash games; Basepoker has Pot-Limit Omaha as well.

Everyone pays the same buy-in and gets the same stack, the blinds rise on a clock, you are out when your chips are gone, and the prize money goes to the top places, usually the top 10 to 15%. A freezeout gives you one stack and no way back in. Your plan changes with your stack: play tight early, attack when the blinds grow, and switch to all-in or fold under ten big blinds.

A re-entry tournament lets you buy in again if you bust while late registration is open, as a new player with a fresh starting stack. WePlay's regular tournaments work this way: late registration stays open for well over an hour, and when it closes everyone plays on with what they have. A re-entry costs another full buy-in, so decide before the tournament how many you will allow yourself.

A rebuy tournament lets you buy more chips during a rebuy period, usually the first hour, whenever your stack falls below a line or whenever you like, and at the end of the period everyone may take one add-on, a large block of chips for one more payment. WePlay's Rebuy Rush is the example: unlimited rebuys of 10,000 chips in the first hour, then one add-on of 60,000 chips, for $1 or $2 each depending on the size you play. Everyone knows the add-on is coming, so the budget for a rebuy tournament is the buy-in plus the rebuys you allow yourself plus the add-on, and the first hour is loose by design. Our rebuy tournament strategy works the Rebuy Rush through.

Part of each buy-in goes on every player's head, and you collect it when you knock them out. In a progressive knockout, which is what WePlay's Bounty Blitz is, you collect part of the bounty and the rest is added to your own, so the bounties grow through the tournament. Bounties change the arithmetic of an all-in: a call that is slightly losing in chips can be winning once the bounty is counted, especially against a short stack, so you call a little wider when the bounty is large compared with the buy-in. The sums are in our bounty tournament strategy.

A satellite pays its prizes as tickets to a bigger tournament instead of money. Everyone who finishes in the paid places gets the same ticket, so there is no reason to fight for first place once you are safely in; near the end, a satellite is all about survival. WePlay runs ticket satellites every day, $1.10 for an $11 ticket, $2.20 for a $22 ticket and $3.30 for a $33 ticket, and ticket freerolls that cost nothing to enter and feed them; the satellites keep their add-ons, which for a satellite is fine. Our satellite strategy explains why first place does not matter in one.

Three players, a short stack, fast blinds, and a prize pool drawn at random before the first hand, from a small multiple of the buy-in up to a jackpot. Most games pay about double the buy-in to the winner; now and then the wheel lands on a big multiplier. WePlay calls them Spins; Basepoker's version is Spin & Cash with buy-ins from $0.25 to $200 and top prizes from $5,000 to $400,000. A game takes a few minutes, so you can play twenty or fifty in an evening. The skill is in three-handed, short-stack play, mostly before the flop; the jackpot is luck. Our Spins strategy has the plan for each stack size.

Every hand you have two choices: go all-in or fold. The stacks are short, so a hand lasts seconds, and the whole game is one decision repeated: is this hand good enough to put it all in against the players still to act? Basepoker runs All In or Fold tables. It is the purest short-stack poker there is, and a push-or-fold chart is most of the strategy; ours is in All In or Fold strategy, and the push or fold chart has the heads-up ranges by stack size.