The bubble - and why you want to be in it

The bubble refers to the players who get paid in a tournament. Obviously you want to be in the bubble, because everyone outside it gets nothing for their efforts. So therefore being in the bubble is good and being out of the bubble is bad.

The tournament bubble

If you have a tournament with 100 players, that tournament may state they are paying the top 15 players. That means you donÃ�¢??t want to get knocked out of the tournament before 15 players are left, otherwise you get no prize money and your buy-in just got flushed down the toilet.

So the bubble in this case is the first 15 players. When play gets down to the last 20 players in this tournament, everyone is going to be playing extremely cautiously. No one wants to get knocked out without getting in the bubble.

The bubble boy

The bubble boy is the person who burst the bubble. In other words this is the last player who is outside the bubble. For example, in our tournament described above, the player who was knocked out in 16^th place would be the bubble boy. He bursts the bubble and everyone who is now left wins some prize money.

No one ever wants to be the bubble boy. It is the most frustrating placing in a poker tournament because you missed a share of the prize money by a cats whisker.