The Beginners Guide
Overview
Continuing with our beginners guide series, today we will discuss some basic strategies for the “Flip & Go” tournaments, one of the many online poker tournament variants offered through the GGPoker poker room. Flip & Go poker tournaments are not your average online poker tournaments. First, unlike most poker games, is split into 2 parts: The Flip stage and The Go stage. During The Flip stage betting begins automatically with the players being forced all-in. The winner at each table advances to the Go stage. During the Go stage, hosting the players with the winning hand from each poker table in the Flip stage, reverts to the classic games rules, with all of the players now in the money! These poker tournaments usually take a little bit longer than an hour, with The Flip stage lasting approximately 5 minutes and The Go stage running for the remainder of the time.
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The Basic Rules
Flip & Go tournaments are offered at four buy-ins: $0.05, $0.50, $3 and $20, which offers a comfortable price and good game for most bankrolls. This betting round of the card game is played following the basic rules of Texas Holdem Poker. If you have ever wanted a fast way to skip the early stages of a tournament and get right to the money or final table, this is the perfect game for you!
As Flip & Go tournaments are played in two stages it only makes sense that we break down the gameplay the same way. We will review both stages of the poker game individually and offer some beginner tips to help you become more familiar with the game.
Round 1 – The Flip
When the poker tournament game begins, you can buy into up to 8 Flip stages for each tournament. Every flip stage in which you are the last remaining player, will be added to your starting stack for The Go stage; the more Flip stages you win, the bigger your Go stage starting stack will be.
The flip stage of this tournament is a forced bet, played in automatic ”all-in” mode; however, there are a few small differences. Instead of receiving the traditional 2 hole cards, each of the poker players is dealt 3 private cards. Once the deal is complete, each player has 30 seconds to discard one of the 3 cards before the first round of betting and being forced all-in. Every hand of The Flip stage is dealt with the ‘Run it Twice’ feature activated. This has the effect of reducing variance and bad beats. The table will play ‘Run it Twice’ until there are two players left at which point the games will deal only 1 set of community cards. You can join with up to 5 times the buy-in, with each buy-in increasing your starting stack up to a maximum of 5.000 chips (1,000 chips per entry). All of the buy-in strategies have benefits, but from my experience, it’s always best to join a flight with the maximum entries – if your bankroll allows, no different than at cash games. Basic tournament strategy will tell you that the bigger stack in a tournament has an advantage over the smaller stacks, and the best thing you can do here is try to give yourself an advantage going into The Go stage.
There is one other change worth mentioning in The Flip stage. If our 3-card starting hand is a Straight Flush (K-Q-J all of the same suit), Three of a Kind, a 3-card Flush or a 3-card Straight, we receive an instant bonus to our starting stack. The Straight Flush carries a 4x bonus, the Three-of-a-Kind has a 3x bonus and the last 2 hands both have a 2x bonus. Finding one of these starting hands is always a great start, but do not count on them as a way to boost your starting stacks.
Round 2 – The Go
While there is certainly luck involved during the first stage of the Flip & Go tournaments, when you finally make it to round 2, The Go stage, a relaxing calm washes over you. And then round 2 starts and you are back at the tables. More importantly, you have skipped the early grind and are now In The Money!.
The Go stage starts every hour and players start with the total combined stacks from stage 1. On average, each player starts with a stack of around 40BB’s with blinds increasing every 5 minutes.
Armed with this knowledge, we are able to build a beginner strategy. Starting with an average stack of 40BB means we can wait for a decent or premium hand. We can try to set a trap, play preflop with some suited connectors or, if we have a big enough stack, apply some pressure. We do all of this with one goal in mind, to climb the money ladder as high as possible!
Flip & go tournaments offer us the opportunity to play our favorite game starting in the late stages of a tournament, skipping the boring early stage and focusing on practicing how to play when In the Money!
Leaderboard
Similar to other games on the site, GGPoker offers a daily leaderboard for Flip & Go tournaments. Over $5,000 (at the time of writing this) in prizes are awarded daily, split over the various buy-ins. Players earn points on the leaderboard every time they buy-in to a tournament. Players earn 1 leaderboard point for every buy-in you start with and will receive bonus points based on the first Flip Bonus of a match.
Summary
Hopefully this beginner strategy guide for Flip & Go online poker tournaments helps you understand how the game works and will allow you to start creating your own strategy for this poker tournament variant.
Best of luck in The Flip stage of this poker tournament and may you make all the right decisions in The Go stage. Select your buy in, flip to the go stage and then enjoy your late game while climbing the money ladder!
As always, when you play online poker games, remember it’s supposed to be fun and please play responsibly!