A Qualifying Tournament or 'Qualifier'

A qualifier is a feeder tournament into a larger tournament. It acts as a way for players to get into a larger tournament without having to stump up the whole buy in. Most large tournaments have a number of feeder tournaments or qualifiers for a fraction of the entry amount. It's also the one time that we don't mind getting the 'cheap seats'.

A good example is the World Series of Poker which offers thousands of feeder tournaments which are available in almost all online poker rooms. A typical feeder tournament to the WSOP main event, which costs $10,000, might offer entry to the feeder at $100 with 1 in every 100 players being offered a seat to the main event. Of course qualifiers are not just for the major land based tournaments, they're offered to all sorts of tournaments, live and online. There's no financial limit at which feeders are offered.

This route to a tournament offers a cost effective was to gain entry to a tournament which has a buy in amount that you would otherwise not buy into. A good news story that became infamous was Chris Moneymaker who famously turned a $39 qualifier at Pokerstars and went on to win the main even, netting a cool $2.5M. Not a bad mark up.

Sub Qualifiers

Sub qualifiers are qualifying events that feed into qualifiers. These are used where there are a number of different qualifying events. For instance you might have a $10,000 main event which has a $1,000 qualifier to it. This would reward 1 in 10 people with a seat. A qualifying event to the $1,000 event would be a sub qualifier and might be $100, also rewarding 1 in 10 with a seat at the main qualifier.