Ranking tournament

The format is the backbone of German-speaking live poker and barely exists in the English-speaking circuit, where a festival is a self-contained event. Three operators we cover run it: the nine Spielbanken Bayern houses feed one Pokermeisterschaft with at least two ranking tournaments per house per month, Baden-Wuerttemberg runs its own championship out of Baden-Baden, and the Saarland Spielbank group runs a ranking out of Neunkirchen on Tuesdays and Fridays that ends in a season final.

What matters strategically is that the incentive is attendance rather than any one result. A player who turns up every week to a 60 to 110 euro qualifier accumulates points that someone playing a single event cannot catch, however well they run. That makes a ranking series very good value for a player living near one casino and close to worthless for a visitor passing through - the exact inverse of a festival, where a tourist and a local buy in on equal terms.

A second consequence is soft fields at the bottom and a hard field at the top. The qualifiers draw the casino's regular local players at low buy-ins, while the final concentrates the players disciplined enough to have played the whole season.

Some houses layer a jackpot on top: Hannover withholds a share of each Monday prize pool into a half-yearly ranking jackpot, so part of the money a qualifier generates is deferred into the standings rather than paid out on the night. Read the ranking rules before assuming the advertised prize pool is what is actually being played for.