The casino and home poker games offer plenty of fun and excitement, but when it comes to sheer poker intensity, it’s the tournament format that really turns the heat way up.

Tournaments are the place where you will find the serious competition. The inventor, Benny Binion, brought the best card players and gamblers in the United States together in 1970 at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. The group paid $10,000 to enter and slugged it out in what became known as the World Series of Poker. Now, tournament play rules the poker world and the WSOP along with the World Poker Tour have become media darlings in the past five years as the game has taken off like a rocket.

A tournament is a fixed buy-in event that can include anywhere from dozens of players to thousands. And the buy-in could range from $25 to $10,000. It’s all a matter of the size and scope of the tournament. The 2005 WSOP, for example, had 5,619 entries with a $10,000 buy-in. And that was just for the main event. But the winner was well-compensated, as Australian Joseph Hachem played his way into poker history by capturing the main event and walking away with a cool $7.5 million.

What’s great about high-end tournament poker is that anyone can take on the world’s best players and you don’t always need a boatload of cash to enter. WSOP winner Chris Moneymaker was a virtual unknown until he won the main event in 2003. Moneymaker paid just $40 and won an online satellite tournament to secure his entry into the main event. And the rest is history. Moneymaker was the last man standing, beating veteran Sammy Farha and walking away with $2.5 million. Small buy-in satellite events can be found at casinos, card clubs and online poker rooms.

All of the typical skills you would bring to any other poker game apply at the tournament table. Reading tells, positional strategy and table image are all in play. The major difference is a sort of poker Darwinism. Tournament poker is all about survival of the fittest. You have to hold on to your chips because you can’t tap your wallet to buy more. Once you’ve lost them all, you’re history, and officially part of the “rail.”

The professionals go into any tournament wanting to win, but understand that the reality is they will finish first very few times. A much more important and plausible target is to finish in the money. If tournament poker becomes more of a job than a weekend hobby, consistently taking home some cash is more of a priority than finishing at the top.

Since your chip count is vital in tournament games, decisions regarding each hand should be based on your stack and others, along with the traditional factors like position. The theory of survival means that if you plan on calling, do it with a strong hand. And also be prepared to lay down a lot more good hands than you normally would. You don’t want to consistently face drawing hands when your tournament life is on the line.