Late registration
Late registration is the period after a tournament has started during which players may still buy in, arriving with a stack that is short relative to the blinds.
Registering late costs chips and saves time. You arrive with fewer big blinds than the players who started, and you skip the levels where the blinds were smallest and the play was deepest.
Whether that is a good trade depends on the structure and on you. In a slow event the early levels are worth playing; in a fast one they are worth very little, and a shorter stack changes the game into one where most decisions are simply whether to move all in.
an example
your cards
You register at the end of the last permitted level with 20 big blinds instead of the 200 the field started with. That is not a small handicap, and it does mean every decision from here is a push or fold decision rather than a postflop one.
This example is made up. The real one is in your own hand history: find late registration in your own hands and see how often it came up and what it cost you.
related terms
MTT
A multi table tournament is an event where every entrant starts with the same chips, the blinds rise on a clock, and pla ...
Push or fold
Push or fold is the way a very short stack is played, where the only two actions worth taking before the flop are moving ...
Short stack
A stack is short when it is small relative to the blinds, usually under about 30 big blinds, which removes most of the r ...
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Knowing the word is not the same as seeing it.
The full order of play, from the blinds to the showdown.