Finally bit the bullet and I'm going into a VP tournament at the LVH in January. I've been studying and practicing and doing OK on regular casino trips (I hit my first Royal on a 25c 9/6 JoB at the Hilton this year) but I am a total noob otherwise. Sorry for the dumb questions -- are you allowed to pick what game you want on a multigame machine? How long do the sessions usually go, and how many are there? (This is a Fri/Sat tournament). This is my first tourney so I'm not expecting anything but to learn, but will of course do the best I can. Thanks for any tips.
Mary
If their video poker tournaments are like their slot tournaments,
there will be 3 sessions over 2 days. I've never known a video poker
tournament to have a choice of games. Most video poker tournaments
have a limited number of hands that players may play and a limit to
the time in which they may play them, which is generally from 10 to 20
minutes per session. Most make it easy for everyone to finish those
hands, but some are called "speed tournaments," since at least the
slowest, and sometimes all, players can't finish all their hands in
time. Optimal strategy can be tricky, since it's unlikely to be the
same as it is on the game without the tournament prize money being
involved, although that's generally my default strategy. An extreme,
but frequent, kind of example of the divergence of the two strategies
is on the last hand, when you may need a 4 of a kind in order to win
any prize money, in which case you'd want to keep only one of two
pair. The Hilton is particularly laid back in how they run
tournaments. I just played in a slot tournament there in which
several people shared playing the machine next to me in the same
session. I believe the Venetian, and possibly every other place,
would never have allowed such a thing.