Guaranteed tournaments are special MTTs which feature prize-pools guaranteed by the house. Regular MTTs work like this: the player finds the tournament in the lobby, decides to register for it. He pays the buy in and a tournament fee ($10+$1 for instance where the $10 is the buy-in and the $1 is the fee). The buy-in goes into the prize-pool and the tournament fee belongs to the poker room (because it doesn’t rake tournament hands and it has to collect rake in some form). The more people buy into a tournament the bigger the prize-pool swells. There will always be proportionality between the number of players, the size of the prizes, and the number of paying positions. Guaranteed tournaments are not like that. Their prize-pools are guaranteed. If a poker room says they’ll run a $100K guaranteed, it means there will be a prize-pool of $100,000 up for grabs, regardless of whether there will only be 2 players participating or thousands of them. Poker rooms always run a risk with guarantees because if too few people show up for them, they fail to cover the guarantee, and thus they’ll end up losing money. It’s a perpetual gamble, but one that mostly pays off because guaranteed tournaments usually feature huge prize-pools which act as a magnet for players. All the industry-leading poker rooms have some huge weekly and monthly guarantees running. It has lately become a symbol of power in the poker industry to offer the biggest prize-pool weekly guarantee there is.

To register for a guaranteed tourney, a player needs to pay a regular buy-in and a tournament fee too. The bigger the guaranteed prize-pool, the bigger buy-in it’ll feature, but guarantees always offer a much better buy-in/prize-pool ratio than regular MTTs.

If more players register than what the room needs to cover the guarantee, the prize-pool will be automatically increased. This means that in a popular guarantee, the advertised prize-pool is the minimum you’ll share.
Even though the investment/return ratio is usually excellent, the buy-ins might sometimes seem rather steep for the everyday poker player. This is why online poker rooms offer a variety of alternative ways to earn a seat in the big weekly guarantee. There are all sorts of satellites and sub-satellites running through the week, some of which offer seats into the guarantee for a mere few dollars.
These sub-satellites will only give players the possibility to participate in another semi-final where they may eventually earn a seat indeed.
Some of these cheap qualifiers will not even cost real money: they’ll accept poker points for buy-ins. If you count yourself among those better stacked, you may want to skip cheap sub-satellites altogether and buy directly into one of the semi-finals. It’ll cost you more than a few poker points, but you’ll still give yourself a fair shot at winning a seat for about a 10th of the actual price.

Strategy-wise, GTDs have to be approached the same way you’d approach any massive MTT. You need to act tight in the beginning, only make moves on premium hands. Be aware of the fact that this is high-stakes poker. If you’re used to playing in freerolls or low buy-in beginners’ MTTs, you might be in for a surprise here. In a Guaranteed tournament nobody is in a hurry to leave, play will be much tighter in the beginning than what you may have been used to. The size of the blinds compared to that of the pots still doesn’t justify loose play early on. As the blinds slowly escalate, you will want to open up a bit and steal some blinds whenever possible just to keep with the flow. If you stay too tight for too long, the blinds will end up taking a serious toll on your stack and implicitly: on your tournament life.

The most delicate stage in any MTT is right before the bubble bursts. People just hate busting out then, after they’ve struggled and invested time and money to get here. For that, they’ll tighten up and will attempt to just ride their way into the cash on the stack they have. This is where you have to take full advantage of the situation. Being a farmer is the last thing you want to do in a GTD. You need to be a fox, and your goal has to be to finish as deep in the money as possible, not to merely make it there.

Don’t forget to sign up for a rakeback deal if you intend to play in GTDs. You’ll get a nice rebate on the tourney fees you pay out. If you are looking for USA poker rooms please visit OpenPokerUSA.com.