Tag: online poker

Bovada Poker Black Diamond Poker Open Transitions To High-Stakes Championship Series

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Since early March, 2012, Bovada Poker has been running its Black Diamond Poker Open (BDPO), with the low-to-mid stakes Contender Series which gave away more than $100,000 before it ended last Sunday, March 18 with a $25,000 guaranteed main event. Now the series switches into high gear, with the mid-to-high stakes Championship Series, at which more than $600,000 will be awarded and which includes a $250,000 guaranteed main event.

The Championship Series of the Bovada Poker BDPO runs Monday, March 19 to Sunday, April 1, 2012. In addition to the $250,000 GTD main event, it also features a $50,000 guaranteed event and a $5,000 engraved ChampionshipWatch to the winner of the main event.

BDPO Event #1 of the Championship Series starts tonight at 8 pm with a $50k GTD event for a $150 + $12 buy-in and at 10 pm with a $10k GTD for a $69 + $6 buy-in. BDPO Events will continue, twice daily, at 8 pm and 10 pm each night, Monday through Friday. The BDPO weekend schedules are different, with events at 2 and 5 on Saturdays and 5 and 7 on Sundays.

Interested players can download the full BDPO schedule from the Bovada Poker site.

Buy-ins for Bovada Poker Black Diamond Poker Open Championship Series events range from $30 + $3 to $200 + $15. Lower cost satellites into the BDPO Championship Series events are no longer running, having finished out on March 4, but you can still qualify for the BDPO Championship Series Main Event and avoid paying that direct buy-in through a special satellite tournament taking place on Saturday, March 31.

Poker Maximus on Lock Poker Keeps Firing With Incredible Past Sunday

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It’s safe to say that the Poker Maximus poker series is completely blowing up in the online poker world right now.  The hype behind this series just continues to grow after an incredible Sunday afternoon of poker events this past week.  The Poker Maximus series features all different levels of buy-ins for their events, but most importantly offers some great guarantees for their players, and some of those guarantees have been getting as much as doubled as well!  The Merge Gaming Network has done an excellent job with this series, and players are loving the action on Lock Poker.  Let’s take a look at the action from this past Sunday that included guarantees of $10k, $15k, $75k, and even $150k.

The first event started with a $30 buy-in that had a guarantee of $15k.  That guarantee was completely slaughtered though, as it ended up being over $78k in total by the end of the registration.  With 2,603 players in the event, there was sure to be some excellent poker going on, and one of the Lock Poker pro’s actually made it to the final table.  It was Matt Stout, and he eventually ended up finishing in fourth place when all was said and done.

One of the next tournaments on the board drew in so many players (over 4,000) that they decided to change the event from a rebuy to a freezeout.  The original guarantee was set at $10k, but the final total in the prize pool ended up being $40k.  In reality it was just about $1k short of $40k in the prize pool, but the site decided to add the additional money to make it exactly four times larger than the starting guarantee.

The two other tournaments this past Sunday were the big tournaments, with one that featured a $100 buy-in, and one that had a $200 buy-in.  The $100 buy-in event had a $150k guarantee, which ended up being more than $200k after the final registration was done.  This sent the eventual winner home with $34k at the end of the day.  The $200 buy-in event had an impressive 812 players in it, and the guarantee of $75k was more than doubled up to $162k.  This meant another big pay day for the winner in the end!

This series will be going on through the 21st of the month, so for just under one more week.  Get in on the action while you can and take home some of these guaranteed prize pools!

Earn Elite Benefits at America’s Cardroom

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America’s Cardroom has taken the patriotic theme one step further, describing its loyalty program in military terms and enlisting players to train for Elite Benefits. As with any poker site’s rewards program, America’s Cardroom’s Elite Benefits are all based on earning points for your play at the site.

There are two types of points you can earn in this program. You earn Combat Points (CP) each time you participate in a cash ring game or online tournament with real money at the America’s Cardroom site. You earn Rank Points (RP) each time you pay a tourney fee or pay a rake in ring games. CP are used to activate bonuses, release special rewards and make purchases in the AC online store. RP are used to determine your rank in the AC rewards program. You start out as a Lieutenant as of your first cash game or tourney.

Obviously the higher your rank, from Captain to Major to Colonel to General, the more benefits you receive, including an ever-increasing CP multiplier.

All players at any level have access to Medals of Achievement and Site Freerolls. Captains also get $50 cash for use in the store. Majors get $300 cash in the store. Colonels get $600 and Generals get $1,500 and $4,000. Each rank also has a different level of store access, with correspondingly increasing benefits.

You also need to maintain a certain minimum level of monthly RPs to maintain the rank you’ve attained. The exception to that are Generals who must only maintain a yearly minimum RP level to keep their rank.

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day With 888 Poker’s Happy Hangover

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Players at 888 Poker this month can look forward to a shot at a free instant bonus, a free trip to Dublin, Ireland and a piece of $5k, all in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. They’re calling it the Happy Hangover and it’s easy to see why.

First prize is a $3,000 trip to the 2012 Irish Poker Open on April 8th to 9th. It includes the buy-in to the No Limit Hold’em Freezeout main event, worth €1,000, along with $1.5k for travel and hotel expenses and an 888Poker “live event merchandise kit”.

The runners up in the $5,000 St Patrick’s Day Hangover Freeroll will share $2,000 cash.

To win a seat in the $5,000 St Patrick’s Day Hangover Freeroll where all these prizes will be given away, on March 18th, 2012 at 7 pm GMT, just make a deposit of any amount into your 888 Poker real money account before March 18 using the promo code IRISH2012.

Also when you make your deposit using this promo code, you’ll receive an Instant $10 bonus free.

Registration for the $5,000 St Patrick’s Day Hangover Freeroll starts 6 hours prior to the shuffle up and deal. The Irish Open of Poker is Europe’s longest standing live tournament of poker.

In other 888 Poker news, the site’s annual satellite series for the World Series of Poker Main Event has begun. Running every other Sunday, these qualifiers cost $525 to buy-in directly, although you can win seats through much cheaper satellites now at the site.

Americas Cardroom to hold 250k GTD on Black Friday Anniversary

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As the online poker world gets ready to solemnly remember Black Friday, Americas Cardroom is giving everyone a major reason to celebrate. On April 15th, the US-friendly online poker site will introduce the Liberty Quarter Million, a No-Limit Hold’em online poker tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $250,000. The first place prize is guaranteed at least $50,000.

“April 15th will go down in history as a day that we’ll never forget, but this time it’ll be because of something incredible,” stated Michael Harris, an America’s Cardroom spokesman. “We’ve been growing our online poker community over the last year by leaps and bounds, and we’re excited to celebrate poker freedom with all our players by putting $500,000 on the table over five weekends.”

The Liberty Quarter Million tournament is part of Liberty Weekends, where $500,000 will be spread out over two big online poker tournaments every weekend between March 31st and April 29th. The Sunday tournaments are Re-Entry tournaments with a 3 hours late registration. That means if a player is eliminated from the tournament while registration is still open, they’ll have the option to buy back in as a new player.

On Saturdays at 7:00pm ET, Americas Cardroom hosts a $10,000 GTD with a $50+5 buy-in. On Sundays at 6:00pm ET, the guarantee hits $50,000 and costs just $200+15 to get into. Both weekend tournaments offer players 10,000 in starting chips.

For those players looking to satellite their way in, on April 13th at 8:00pm ET Americas Cardroom will be hosting a 250 Seat Super Satellite with 250 seats guaranteed for the April 15th Quarter Million Tournament. The 250 Seat Super Satellite will cost only $36+3 to get into.

The $50,000 and $250,000 GTD tournaments offer a familiar blind structure and buy-in to US players who were victimized by Black Friday’s events, a signal that Americas Cardroom means business about becoming the #1 destination for online poker in the US.

Liberty Weekends kicks off on Saturday, March 31st, 2012. Full details on Americas Cardroom’s satellite structure for all 10 Liberty Weekends tournaments can be found at AmericasCardroom.

PokerStars to Meet With Players

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PokerstarsOnline poker site PokerStars has officially decided to schedule meetings with poker players at their headquarters in the Isle of Man.  There will be different representatives from poker forums who will be coming forward to meet with the higher-ups who work at the poker site, and the meetings are set to run from April 11th to April 13th.  The general idea behind the meeting is to talk with players about why PokerStars does what it does, and also to get feedback from their players to help continually grow in the right direction throughout 2012.  The information that will be talked about is said to be “confidential” making these meetings even more interesting.

This all began from a forum moderator with the Two Plus Two forum named Mike Haven, who was contacted by the site.  The representative from Stars asked Haven to be a part of organizing the meetings and the selection process for who would be attending the meetings.  Haven stated that the two reasons why PokerStars wants to meet with players are to simply get feedback and hear from players, and also to help players better understand how PokerStars runs and what makes them decide to do specific things.  A lot of this is stemming from the sit-out that occurred on the first of the year, and Stars promised that they would meet with players to talk about the changes.

The sit-out that we are talking about occurred after PokerStars decided to change both their rake structure and also their VIP program as well.  Players were infuriated by this, as it was going to lose them quite a bit of money, and as one Supernova Elite level player said, he would lose “about $41,200 in rewards”.  The general idea behind the changes are that instead of every player involved in a hand getting VPPs split up, that players would get more VPPs based on how much money that they put into the pot.

It will definitely be interesting to see what type of response that the players who are selected come back from the PokerStars headquarters with.  We’ll keep you updated as more news is released from both sides here.

America’s Cardroom Points Race Upped to $85k in March

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Recently America’s Cardroom began to offer weekly and monthly points races with large guaranteed prize pools and numerous opportunities for players at all different levels to win. This month it’s no different, except the prize pool just got bigger.

For this March’s points race, America’s Cardroom has increased the prize pool to $85k. That amount will be given out through a month-long race with a $60k prize pool and five weekly races each with a $5k prize pool.

The $25k Sprints take place every weekend this month, from Friday through Sunday. At each 3-day long sprint, first place takes home $1,000; second place gets $500; third gets $350; fourth $250; and fifth $200, paying out the top 75 players each weekend a cash reward of at least $29.

The schedule of $5k Sprints is as follows:
• March 2 – 4
• March 9 – 11
• March 16 – 18
• March 23 to 25
• March 30 to April 1

In these sprints, only points players earn at cash ring games count. Tournament points are not eligible for this event. But they are for the $60k Marathon.

The $60k Marathon awards $8k to first place, $4k to second, $2.5k to third, $2.25k to fourth and $2k to fifth, paying out to the top 275 players a sum of at least $25.

Tournament players can earn extra points in the contest by registering for certain big money and live satellite tournaments taking place now at the site, including all of America’s Cardroom’s guaranteed tournaments and the satellite for the LSOP Peru.

New Poker Documentary “All In” Hits Theaters This Month

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A new documentary on the rise and fall and rise again of poker is hitting theaters this month. It’s called “All In – The Poker Movie” and it opens in theaters nationwide on March 23rd, 2012. It will also be made available on iTunes as of April 24th.

The movie features narration by Matt Damon and a star-studded cavalcade of celebrity poker players, many of whom are subjects of the documentary’s storyline, such as Chris Moneymaker, the first amateur online poker player to win the WSOP championship, and the first in a long line of them to follow.

But Moneymaker is far from the only or first trendsetter in poker, and movie watchers can enjoy a trip back to poker’s early days when legendary players Stu Unger and Amarillo Slim looked spry and baby-faced and had no clue their little high stakes tournament experiment would one day transform into that very same World Series of Poker where thousands of players from around the world converge on Las Vegas to vie to split tens of millions of dollars in cash rewards and a place in poker’s history books (or perhaps the next poker documentary.)

The story of the U.S. D.O.J.’s seizure and closure of the 3 biggest poker sites in the world at the time: Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars also plays a central role in this film, including the aftermath of that blow to the poker world.

As the star of “Rounders” considered a classic of poker moviemaking, Matt Damon seems a fitting choice to put a Hollywood profile on this Las Vegas story.

Black Diamond Poker Open From Bovada

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Bovada is quickly becoming one of the more talked about online poker sites for United States poker players these days, and it’s for good reason.  They offer some great online poker action all over the place, including cash games and great poker tournaments as well.  One thing that currently stands out at Bovada poker is their Black Diamond Poker Open.  This is a tournament series that the site is running, and it is one that should dominate anything that has run on their site in the past as well!  It’ll be made up of some big prize pools and have two main events as well.

There are two different series at the Black Diamond Open, which include the Contender Series and the Championship Series, which are made up of different size buy-ins and different size prize pools as well.  The “Contender Series” features buy-ins that are more for recreational players to mid-level players, and it will have a  Main Event that features a $25k guarantee, which will be played in the middle of March on the 18th.  In total the guaranteed prize pools for this series are made up of around $100k in total prize throughout the series!

As far as the Bovada Poker Championship Series goes, this will start just after the Contender Series.  These events are for the mid-level to high stakes poker players, and the Main Event for this series features a $250k guarantee as well.  This event will give first place at least a $50k prize and a nice watch worth $5k as well, and the tournament will take place on the 1st of April.

One of the best parts about this event is the fact that people can also win their way into many of the events for as little as $1 through the many satellites that Bovada will be offering.  On top of that though, there are also things called “Super Satellite Days” that happen just before each of the two Main Events.  These are great ways to be able to get into the big time buy-in tournaments with huge prize pools, without having to pay the full buy-in for the event!

Poker Maximus Event on Lock Poker is a Knockout

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Lock PokerFor those of you who haven’t heard about the Poker Maximus series on the popular online poker site Lock Poker, then you are simply missing out on some excellent action.  The Merge Network launched the Poker Maximus series which will run from the 4th of March through the 21st of the month, and features many different tournament buy-in sizes, as well as some massive guaranteed events as well.  When the tournaments started, the guarantees varied quite a bit depending on what the buy-in of the tournament was, but the creators of the series’ quickly found out that these guarantees were going to be smashed.

Event #1 started off as a $11 buy-in, that featured a $7,500 guaranteed prize pool.  The event was just a standard No Limit Hold’em Freezeout event, but it was one that absolutely slaughtered that guarantee above.  When all was said and done the total prize pool was $50,550.  There were over 5,000 players in the event, which definitely created quite a nice first place prize for such a small buy-in tournament as well.

The next event was the $150k guarantee Freezeout that featured a buy-in of $109.  The field came to a total of 2,361 players, which was good to add $86k to that prize pool.  The final numbers that were reported were $236,100 in the pool for this event, and the eventual winner “niko79542” got a pay day of over $39k for their efforts.

Now to take a look at the third event, which had a $33 buy-in, and it absolutely annihilated the $15k guarantee.  In total, the prize pool was $79,950, and and first place ALONE was over $13k!  This was probably one of the most impressive jumps in terms of growing prize pools, and one that could even make the next $33 event even larger!

The final event of an incredible opening day at the Poker Maximus event featured a $215 event with a $75k guarantee, and of course once again that guarantee was slaughtered.  In the end, it was a total prize pool of $172,600, and the eventual winner “PokerJoe561”, got over $32.5k for taking it down.

The upcoming weeks of this event should be some incredible poker action, so be sure to get in on the events daily!