Backgammon tournaments

Sit & Go
The most commonly played type of online Backgammon tournaments is sit & go tournaments. Just like the name suggests, these tournaments begin as soon as a predefined number of players has registered for the tournament. Usually sit & gos are for four players, but tournaments of 8, 16, 32 and even 64 players are available.

Buy-in prices for the sit’n'gos vary from as little $5 to $200. As always, the bigger the buy-in, the bigger the pot.

Rating Limited Tournaments
Most Backgammon sites keep track of players performances. Play65 for example gives player a score of 0-2000 depending on how well or badly one does against other players. Rating limited tournaments take advantage of these rankings. Like the name suggests, they are only open to players with skill rating lower than a set limit. This means that players in these tournaments get to play against other players of equal skill level.

Swing Tournaments
In the beginning of a swing tournament each player receive equal amount of chips. Each player in the tournament is randomly matched against one other player for a single game. Player who wins a single game receives an amount of chips from the losing player equal to the tournaments CPP, Chips Per Point. This continues, until until one of the players has accumulated all the chips. To keep the pace up, CPP is raised every few minutes.

Satellites
Satellites are normal tournaments with a scheduled starting time, but they don’t have cash prizes. Instead the winners - usually a certain percentage of the players - win a free entry to a tournament with an expensive buy-in. There is usually several satellites available for bigger tournaments.

It is easy to understand why satellites are popular. $50.000 tournament may have a buy-in price of $175, but satellite to the same tournament may have buy-in of 11$.

Normal tournaments aka Events
Normal tournaments, or “events” as they are called at some sites, have a scheduled starting time and a set buy-in price. Some may have a “guaranteed” price pot, which means that at least the guaranteed sum is divided among the winners. Otherwise the collective buy-in sum of all players minus the sites rake is divided among the winners.

Star tournaments
When you play for real money at Gammon Empire, you receive stars for each dollar you played with (it doesn’t matter if you lost or won). Every now and then there are star tournaments available. These tournaments are free - only buy-in is a certain amount of your stars.