The variety in today’s tournament poker is enormous. Poker tournament fields today can range from two players in an online poker heads-up tournament, to over 8,000 in the 2006 WSOP (World Series of Poker) a field so large that it netted the winner, Jamie Gold, $12 million. The fields can be huge in online free rolls as well. As a tournament player, you have the option to decide how large a field you want to play against, so should you go for the small field or the larger one?
As fields grow, your equity gets better for awhile. This is because tournament tables are played simultaneously, not one after the other, meaning more players means more bust outs per hour. In other words, 60 people may get knocked out of a 30-table tournament just as quickly as 30 people get knocked out of a 15-table tournament, since those extra tables are in action at the same time. Since there is obviously more money to be won at the 30-table tournament, in this case the larger field can be to your advantage, although you have to balance this against the fact that more chips are in play in the larger tournament, which means you may be up against bigger stacks at times.
Once the fields get into the thousands though, the additional players can make a real difference, and it might be a different type of poker game. Now you will have to play many more hands to win, which means you will probably have to win many more confrontations with small edges or even at a disadvantage, making things more difficult. Once again though, the rewards for cashing in a tournament of this size can be great.
Keep in mind that the size of the tournament, when combined with the length of rounds and depth of stacks, dictates the length of the tournament. A 50-player tournament may well be finished in the course of an afternoon, whereas a 300 player tournament may take all night, and a thousand or more player tournament may even require multiple days to complete (this is less likely in online poker play). You must decide how much time you have to commit to the tournament before you choose one with a large field.
Ultimately, what field size you like is a matter of individual taste. Once the fields get very big, you’ll need to get luckier to win, but the rewards are so much greater that many players feel it is worth the risk. Other players feel that a very small tournament gives their skill a better opportunity to work, and the likelihood of their winning makes the smaller prize pool worth pursuing. You may want to try both larger and smaller tournaments yourself to find out which suits you best.

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