While everyone is familiar with how normal Texas Holdem poker tournaments work, not everyone is familiar with how exactly some of the poker tournaments with special rules work. PokerStars and FullTilt both run tournaments with special formats, such as Knockout Tournaments, Shootout tournaments, just to name a few. But who between Stars and Tilt has the best selection of special poker tournaments?

PokerStars Specialty Tournaments

While PokerStars has a terrific selection of poker tournaments rich in value, they lack creativity in their offering of specialty tournaments. Sure, PokerStars offers a few different shootout tournament formats. And yes, these shootout tourneys are a slight deviation from the norm, as one has to win their own table in order to progress to the next stage of the tournament – but aside from the shootout, PokerStars is not deep in their specialty tournament selection.

Stars progressed in the right direction, however, when they added their ante tournaments recently. These ante tournaments, unfortunately, are not much different from their traditional tournament. The only exception is the blind structure, which uses antes to pressure players into playing faster and sooner.

I struggle to think of a tournament whose structure I would consider special, as a matter of fact. Stars do offer the occasional heads-up tournaments, as well as short-handed and rebuy tournaments. Unfortunately, there is no one structure that jumps out and screams “This is a PokerStars tournament!” based on structure alone.

FullTilt Specialty Tournaments

FullTilt’s pool of specialty tournaments is a bit larger than that of PokerStars. FullTilt offers the standard – shootout tournaments, rebuy poker tourneys, as well as heads-up tournaments from time to time. And like PokerStars, they offer Turbo tourneys as well as deep stack structured tournaments. In fact, FullTilt Poker has a few different structures for their deep stack tournaments. Tilt offers Double Stack, as well as Super Stack poker tournaments. The Super Stack tournament structure starts tournament players with 5K in tournament chips, while the double stack tournaments begin with each player receiving 3000 in tourney chips.

In addition to the mostly vanilla tournament structures, FullTilt hosts knockout tournaments. The knockout tournaments at FullTilt are structured to add an extra twist to the poker tournament player’s strategy. In the knockout tournament, 20% of each tournament player’s buy-in is set aside as a knockout bounty. As players are knocked out of the tournament, the player busting out his opposition is rewarded with a knockout bonus, which again equates to 20% of the entry fee.

While neither Stars nor Tilt are known for their superior specialty poker tournaments, the slight edge goes to FullTilt Poker. The presence of the knockout tournament structure, as well as the diversity in deep stack tournament play causes FullTilt to cross the finish line in first place for the two-legged specialty tournament race. Fairly noted, both rooms could afford to get a bit more creative in their tournament offerings, however, with the number of tournament players each room has – they need not rush the creative process.