Climbing the Steps
April 29th, 2010Many poker sites these days are offering some kind of “Steps” tournament program where the final prize is huge. The catch, you have to make it through the steps to get the prize. Now sometimes you’ll be able to buy-in to a higher step than step 1, but that’s usually not recommended, and usually there’s a cutoff at the level you can buy into. So how do you master the steps without having to spend hours on the stairmaster?
The obvious answer is to start at step one. While it may be tempting to skip a few steps to make your trip to the prize quicker, my next point may turn you off to that idea.
See, in the steps programs, the buy-ins generally start off low, but grow exponentially fast. Say step 1 is 1 dollar, step 2 may be 5 dollars. step 3 at 15 and step 4 at 50. Well if you only planned on playing one step four game, then by all means jump into step four. But here is the problem with that. Most of these are turbo online poker SnGs. That’s why I recommend starting at step 1.
With step one, you don’t need as big a bankroll. 30 buy-ins is usually sufficient to keep your progress strong and steady and keep you advancing through the ranks. So which do you prefer, 30 dollars to play 30 step one games, or 1500 to play 30 step 4 games? I thought you’d see it my way when put in that perspective.
The next step in steps is to play all of your bankroll you’ve allocated to the tournament on the first step. This means you’ll be playing 30 step one poker online games, trying to earn as many step 2 tickets as you can. You do this for each step, as the more chances you have at each step, the better protection you have from the variance of these games.
Once you start getting an idea of the competition of each step, you’ll soon find yourself taking down a lot of games simply due to your patience to grind out next step tickets instead of jumping right into the next step, losing and being right back at the bottom of the stairwell. Keep the pace, and in less time than you realize, you’ll be securely sitting on a high step instead of grasping for dear life not to fall because you only had one shot at step 6 instead of the 10 you grinded out of your 20 step 5 entries.