What is a Poker League?
A poker league is a set of organized tournaments in which players accumulate points in order to crown an overall league winner (the League Ace). The idea behind a poker league is to reward poker players for consistent performances over a span of multiple games. Poker leagues have become a popular way to organize regular monthly home poker games as well as to create competitive social games in bars and restaurants. Although poker leagues can reward an individual game winner with a prize, the main goal is to be on top of the league points leader board at the end of the season. One reason poker leagues are popular is because they help to minimize some of the variance so often found in poker. It's hard for one player to run bad for a whole season, so good players often find that they can do well in poker leagues even when getting unlucky in a few games. Because of this lowering of variance all games in a season should count towards the overall points. Occasionally we are contacted by a league admin that wants to only tally points for the top X games in a season. We feel that this is simply adding the variance back into the game that leagues were designed to minimize.
An Example League
- Plays one tournament a month
- Players pay $30 to enter the league which is distributed amongst the top X players at the end of the season
- Players pay an additional $5 for each game they attend to go to a winner-take-all pot for that game (optional - thi helps with allowing occasional non-league players to play)
- Points are recorded for each game: 1 point for showing up to the game, 1 point for each player an individual lasts longer than, 2 bonus points for first place (or top finishing league player), and 1 extra point for each player an individual knocks out of the tournament (bounty)