Satellite tournaments

A Satellite Poker Tournament is a smaller, less expensive buy-in tournament in which one or more of the prizes consist of a seat in a more expensive and/or larger buy-in tournament. For example, if you won a $100 buy in satellite tournament, in the one of the poker rooms, (or on-line) one of the top winning prizes might be a chair in a $1000 buy-in tournament (the next step up the tournament ladder). So, instead of distributing the prize pool over the top chip winners as done in standard tournaments, the prize or part of the prize pool is used to buy a chair at the next level in the poker tournament ladder. When Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas he had originally paid $40 to enter an on-line satellite tournament, which he won. That win paid his $10,000 WSOP entry fee. Large tournaments like the WSOP generate a lot of satellites both live and on-line.