Playing a Tournament
Once you have selected a new tournament and edited it to your liking, you can go
to the game screen and begin playing the tournament by clicking the
Start Game button that appears at the bottom of the Tournament Lobby
screen. Alternatively, if you have selected an unfinished tournament that you
would like to resume, you can click the Resume Unfinished button that
appears at the bottom of the Tournament Lobby which will take you to the
game screen where you can continue playing through the resumed tournament.
Once you are sitting at the poker table to play a tournament game, the
Tournament Standings Window option will either appear depending on how your
preferences are setup or will become enabled in your main window's Lobby
menu where it can be opened using the Tournament Standings... menu item or
the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-T.
When playing a tournament, not all the options that are available when playing a
ring game are allowed. More specifically, during a tournament, the following will
either not be allowed or will do nothing: freezing the button, setting the button,
shuffling seats, setting bankrolls, or modifying or saving tables.
During tournament play, you deal hands using the Deal Hand button as you
would in a ring game. When you press the Deal Hand button, a tournament
manager first checks if the level needs to be incremented and then checks if
tables need to be balanced in a multi-table tournament and moves players if
necessary. If either the level is incremented, tables have been removed, or you
have been moved, you will see an announcement in the center of the table notifying
you what has happened. The announcement is followed by a slight pause so that
you can read the announcement and then a hand will be dealt.
While your table is playing, all the other tables in the tournament, if there are
any, will play simultaneously in the background. When your game finishes, and the
games at each of the background tables finish, the game that you just played will
be logged to the Hand History Database and update
statistics relevant to your play (including
those in the
Tournament Standings Window
and the tournament standings section in the Sidebar).
In a multi-table tournament
none of the background table games will be logged so they will not appear in the
Hand History Database. After the game is logged, the
Deal Hand button
will appear so that you will be able to deal the next hand in the tournament or rely
on Auto Deal to deal the next hand automatically for you.
Background Tables
Since there are potentially many tables all playing at once, the computer opponents
playing on background tables have their allowed computational capabilities selectively
reduced so that many opponents can all play at once and play quickly. As the size
of the multi-table tournaments increase, the more the computational capabilities of
the computer opponents on background tables have to be reduced. In a tournament
consisting of up to three tables, all tables are played with all computer opponents
at their full capabilities. Once you have up to and including five active tables,
the computer opponents on the additional two tables are further reduced so that
no opponent modelling is done. Once you go past five active tables, all computer
opponents on background tables are reduced so that they do no opponent modelling and
also have their computational resources quite strongly reduced. No matter what size
of tournament you play though, all computer opponents on the table that you are
playing on never have their computational capabilities reduced.
Winning a Tournament
When you are fortunate enough to win a tournament, you will see an overlay that appears
over the poker table that will congratulate you and present you with some summary
information that includes how much money you have won and how many players you have
beaten. This overlay has a Back to Lobby button that dismisses the overlay and
takes you back to the Tournament Lobby.
Busting out of a Tournament
If you are unfortunate enough to bust out of a tournament, you will see an overlay that
appears over the poker table that will present you with summary information that includes
how much money you have lost. This overlay has two buttons on it. The Quit Tournament
button will quit the tournament when pressed and take you back to the
Tournament Lobby.
The Continue Tournament button will dismiss the overlay and allow you to watch
the tournament finish as an observer. If you do watch the tournament through to completion
when the tournament ends the summary overlay will appear again informing you again of your
results and wait for you to press the Back to Lobby button which will dismiss the overlay
and take you back to the Tournament Lobby.
Quitting a Tournament
If at any point in time you want to quit playing your tournament to play a different game or
just because you are done with playing for the time being, you can just select the different
game you would like to play or close the application and your tournament will automatically
be saved and added to your Unfinished Tournaments section of the tournament list on
the left hand side of the Tournament Lobby screen. If you do quit an unfinished
tournament and do not want to actually ever resume the tournament, you will have to manually
remove that particular tournament from the Unfinished Tournaments in the
Tournament Lobby using the trash can icon.