# Playing a Tournament

Once you have selected a new tournament and edited it to your liking, you can go to the game screen and begin playing the tournament by clicking the Start Game button that appears at the bottom of the Tournament Lobby screen. Alternatively, if you have selected an unfinished tournament that you would like to resume, you can click the Resume Unfinished button that appears at the bottom of the Tournament Lobby which will take you to the game screen where you can continue playing through the resumed tournament.

Once you are sitting at the poker table to play a tournament game, the Tournament Standings Window option will either appear depending on how your preferences are setup or will become enabled in your main window's Lobby menu where it can be opened using the Tournament Standings... menu item or the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-T.

When playing a tournament, not all the options that are available when playing a ring game are allowed. More specifically, during a tournament, the following will either not be allowed or will do nothing: freezing the button, setting the button, shuffling seats, setting bankrolls, or modifying or saving tables.

During tournament play, you deal hands using the Deal Hand button as you would in a ring game. When you press the Deal Hand button, a tournament manager first checks if the level needs to be incremented and then checks if tables need to be balanced in a multi-table tournament and moves players if necessary. If either the level is incremented, tables have been removed, or you have been moved, you will see an announcement in the center of the table notifying you what has happened. The announcement is followed by a slight pause so that you can read the announcement and then a hand will be dealt.

While your table is playing, all the other tables in the tournament, if there are any, will play simultaneously in the background. When your game finishes, and the games at each of the background tables finish, the game that you just played will be logged to the Hand History Database and update statistics relevant to your play (including those in the Player Statistics System, the Tournament Standings Window and the tournament standings section in the Sidebar). In a multi-table tournament none of the background table games will be logged so they will not appear in the Hand History Database. After the game is logged, the Deal Hand button will appear so that you will be able to deal the next hand in the tournament or rely on Auto Deal to deal the next hand automatically for you.

### Background Tables

Since there are potentially many tables all playing at once, the computer opponents playing on background tables have their allowed computational capabilities selectively reduced so that many opponents can all play at once and play quickly. As the size of the multi-table tournaments increase, the more the computational capabilities of the computer opponents on background tables have to be reduced. In a tournament consisting of up to three tables, all tables are played with all computer opponents at their full capabilities. Once you have up to and including five active tables, the computer opponents on the additional two tables are further reduced so that no opponent modelling is done. Once you go past five active tables, all computer opponents on background tables are reduced so that they do no opponent modelling and also have their computational resources quite strongly reduced. No matter what size of tournament you play though, all computer opponents on the table that you are playing on never have their computational capabilities reduced.

### Winning a Tournament

When you are fortunate enough to win a tournament, you will see an overlay that appears over the poker table that will congratulate you and present you with some summary information that includes how much money you have won and how many players you have beaten. This overlay has a Back to Lobby button that dismisses the overlay and takes you back to the Tournament Lobby.

### Busting out of a Tournament

If you are unfortunate enough to bust out of a tournament, you will see an overlay that appears over the poker table that will present you with summary information that includes how much money you have lost. This overlay has two buttons on it. The Quit Tournament button will quit the tournament when pressed and take you back to the Tournament Lobby. The Continue Tournament button will dismiss the overlay and allow you to watch the tournament finish as an observer. If you do watch the tournament through to completion when the tournament ends the summary overlay will appear again informing you again of your results and wait for you to press the Back to Lobby button which will dismiss the overlay and take you back to the Tournament Lobby.

### Quitting a Tournament

If at any point in time you want to quit playing your tournament to play a different game or just because you are done with playing for the time being, you can just select the different game you would like to play or close the application and your tournament will automatically be saved and added to your Unfinished Tournaments section of the tournament list on the left hand side of the Tournament Lobby screen. If you do quit an unfinished tournament and do not want to actually ever resume the tournament, you will have to manually remove that particular tournament from the Unfinished Tournaments in the Tournament Lobby using the trash can icon.