In a rebuy tournament event the first hour is made up of "rebuys" whereby if your chipstack drops below the original starting amount then you can rebuy chips at the tournament buy in.

This leads to two different knock on effects:

The first is that if you are one of the blinds on the first hand your workable stack has dropped below the starting stack amount and so you are entitled to rebuy. Doubling your stack straight away.

This gives you no significant advantage other than a psychological one when playing a pot.

Secondly and more importantly, if you bust out of the tournament you can rebuy in to it.

It's this second aspect that is misunderstood and misused by many rebuy players.

The fact that you can rebuy into the tournament for the first hour means that in the lower stakes tournaments there is a lot of crazy stuff going on! Because people know they can rebuy they tend to shove and call all ins with abandon leading to a lot of very mad play.

Because of the rebuys the rebuy events will have a much larger prize pool per count of starting players than a freezeout.

Where the misunderstanding of a rebuy event lies is in respect to bankroll management.

If you are playing a rebuy event then it stands to reason that you must be prepared to rebuy. A general rule of thumb for rebuys is around five so if you are playing a $3 rebuy event then you should be prepared to invest around $15 if you keep busting out early.

A freezeout tournament means that once you have lost your chips it's game over. A freezeout tournament is just what it says - once you have lost all your chips you are frozen out.

For a freezeout you can only buy into the tournament once. So if you are playing a $3 freezeout $3 is the most you stand to lose if you bust out early.

For players who need to manage their bankroll within strict guidelines then freezeout tournaments are the ones to play. They also tend to favour better players as weak players will bust out often with poor hands and not be able to rejoin.