Online poker would not exist without tournaments. With all the players connected from around the globe the prize pool is often huge and you only risk the fee to enter the tournament!

In this article we will try to help you find, chose and play the tournament you want, depending on the registration fee and the starting time.

 

The UpperClassPoker lobby 

Among the buttons on the left (1), click "Play Poker / Go to Games", enter your loginand your password if needed. Here you are in our Virtual Game Lobby.

As you can see there are 4 main areas in the lobby:

In the first one (1) you can browse through the various parts of the site. For instance:

• [Play Poker/Go to Games] brings you in a game room
• [My Account] brings you to the virtual cashier
• [Refer a friend]: here you can invite friends to earn Bonus Dollars

This is where we enter the game lobby. We plan to enter a $5 + $0.50 tournament so the first step is to select [Real Money] then [Scheduled Tournaments]. By the way selecting [Games] would have lead us to the standard money rooms and [Sit and Go Tournaments] is about single table tournaments.

Once you've selected [Real Money] then [Scheduled Tournaments] the lower end of this area lists the various kinds of tournaments. Example:

• selecting the [Aruba / WPT / WSOP] tab will display in area #3 the related tournaments, i.e. satellites for the World Series of Poker or the World Poker Tour.
• the same goes with the [Freerolls] tab which displays the tournaments with no registration fee.

For the sake of the example let's select the [Regular] tab which displays the list of all the regular tournaments.

Default sorting is by time and starting hour. Since we're looking for $5 + $0.5 tournaments let's sort the list by registration fee. To do this just click the [Buy in] header (step 1 below) then use the lift on the right (step 2 below; alternatively the mouse wheel can be used to the same effect) to browse down to the $5+.50 tournaments.

Within the list of the $5 + .50 buy-in tournaments you just have to chose now which starting time and hour suits you.

In our example above we have highlighted a $5+.50 tournament held on Wednesday December the 28th 02:00am (A stands for "am" whereas P stands for "pm") ET. This means the starting time wil be 2h00 in the morning in the American Eastern Time zone. For time zone convertion simply check the server time in the lower right corner: it displays the Official Game Time (ET) whenever you need it.

So you see that each tournament has its own details listed in its row:

• Starting date and time

• Type: NL, PL FL stand for No Limit, Pot Limit and Fixed Limit

• Game: Hold'em or Omaha

• Buy in: the tournament registration fee
  

• Remarks: in the highlighted row $1,500 Guaranted means the winners of the tournament will share a minimum of $1,500. The size of the prise pool then depends on the number of players who registered. Important: most of the tournaments are set on a freezout format (no re-buys) yet there happen to have some Rebuy Tournaments. This should be precised in those remarks.

So, one single click allows us read all the details of a given tournament in the area #4.

Now to register we need to double-click on the row of the chosen tournament.

This opens a dedicated window named "Tournament Lobby": 

This window is available anytime before the end of the tournament.

Zone #1: Tournament Statistics lists the following figures of an ongoing tournament:

• Level: blinds value on a given time
  
• Number of players eliminated
• Short/Big/Average chip stacks
  
• Next Level: blinds value on the next level
• Next Break: time before the next break
  

• Starting time (ET)
• Game type: Texas Hold'em or Omaha/NL,PL or FL
  
• Buy-in: registration fee
  
• Remaining time before start
  

Zone #3 details the stakes information:

• Number of entries: registered players
  
• Prize Pool
• Prize rewarding structure
  

The stake information is not valid until the registration process is closed. What is more concerning Rebuy Tournaments the precise Prize Pools cannot be known before the rebuy process is closed.

Zone #4 is a detailed description of the tournament.

Zone #5 displays the registered players listing.
In order to register you need to click [Register] at the bottom-right (middle button: follow the arrow in the picture above).

This opens a confirmation pop-up named Tournament Buyin:

It's all in the name: the application asks for your confirmation.

Click OK: a validation message displays. Within a few minutes your username will be listed in the Registered player listing. All you need to do know is to wait for the tournament to begin: simply open the application a couple of minutes before the starting time and on H hour you'll automatically be seated in a room to play the tournament.

Good luck!

NB: you can close the application after you have completed the registration process. Just remember to launch the application and log in (if not done automatically) a couple of minutes before the offical starting time.