The Party Poker Monthly Million took a seasonal turn recently for Spring, with an additional Spring Million added to the calendar. Now the site is doing the same for Summer with a special Summer Million tournament coming up on August 7, 2011, with another guaranteed $1 million prize pool.
Leading up to the big million dollar event, Party Poker is raining a spring shower (or maybe a summer storm) of qualifiers down on players, with an abundance of different ways to get in on all the action.
First stage sub qualifiers start out with buy-ins ranging from $1 to $47. These are all speed events, and some are rebuy events as well. The qualifiers into which these events lead have direct buy-ins themselves ranging from $27 to $172. All of these are daily events, with the exception of the $55 MEGA Friday Satellite, awarding 10 seats guaranteed. At all of these qualifiers Party Poker vows to award multiple seats in the $1 million guaranteed Summer Million, based either on the number of players entering or the amount of money in the prize pool.
In addition to all these routes, there are also Daily Country Specific Freerolls with the top 10 from each country or region advancing to the Summer Million Special, and Daily Player Points Qualifiers for buy-ins of 10 PPs and 25 PPs, also which lead into the Summer Million Special, another 10-seat guaranteed event taking place on Fridays.
The Party Poker Summer Million has a $640 direct buy-in and operates with a Championship Blind structure.
PartyPoker is one of the leading online poker rooms. It belongs to PartyGaming, which has recently joined up with Bwin. PartyPoker is licensed and regulated by the Government of Gibraltar. PartyPoker offers an exciting range of promotions for its players. Some of the promotions are standard and are carried forward from month to month. But the more interesting promotions are the topical ones.
WSOP, the biggest land poker extravaganza begins on May 31 in Las Vegas with the Main Event taking place in June. Some of the May promotions at PartyPoker offer WSOP packages. The WSOP 2011 promotion runs right through May. The prizes are $14,000 WSOP packages that include $10,000 WSOP Main Event buy-in, $2,000 spending money and eight nights’ hotel accommodation. In this promotion PartyPoker players can enter through a daily freeroll tournament and work their way up to the WSOP Satellite in which 1 out of 20 players will be given WSOP packages.
The Gladiator is an exciting promotion that runs from May 1 to May 31. PartyPoker has declared different levels of daily targets for loyalty points earned and has designated prizes for players achieving the targets. The prizes are in the form of freeroll tournaments with prize pools ranging from $2,500 to $25,000. Players who earn 1,200 points on each of 30 days will get the grand prize of a WSOP package.
One of the most popular online tournaments at PartyPoker this May will be the $250K Guaranteed Sunday. It will be held every Sunday at 12:45 hours ET. The tournament offers a guaranteed prize pool of $250,000. Players can directly register for the event by paying the buy in of $215. But most PartyPoker players will win entries through a series of low priced qualifiers, some of which are even freerolls. One of the qualifying promotions is the 50 Seat Frenzy, which guarantees 50 seats to the $250K Guaranteed Sunday. The direct buy in for this event is $15. However, there are two qualifiers, one of which is a country specific freeroll and the other is a $2 buy in Saturday morning event.
There are a large number of newbie players at PartyPoker. Especially for them PartyPoker offers a number of freerolls in which they play for free but win cash prizes. In May the combined prize pool of all such freeroll tournaments offered is over $20,000. A large number of these are country specific freerolls, in which players compete with others from the same region. However, the best freeroll promotion is the $1.5K New Player Freeroll. It will be held every Saturday in May. Each event will be capped at 5,000 players and the eligibility criterion is that the player must have made his first deposit in the 60 days before the start of the tournament.
Poker tournaments are not the only promotional events in May. New players are entitled to a 100% welcome bonus up to $/£/€ 500 on their first deposit. Regular players can earn loyalty points called PartyPoints for participating in cash games and tournaments. PartyPoints can then be redeemed for cash.
Consistently one of Party Poker’s most popular promotions, The Gladiator is back this May, giving each player the chance to walk away from the table with up to $4,000 in cash and entry into a freeroll tournament with a prize pool of up to $25,000. There’s even a top prize of a World Series of Poker Main Event seat available to the most serious players.
In The Gladiator promotion, players try to earn a target numbers of points for target numbers of days of the month. The higher the points target you hit, the higher the prize. The more days you hit a particular points target, the higher the prize. Prizes start with freeroll entries with prize pools of $2,500; $5,000; $10,000 and $25,000. Surpass those targets and get the $25,000 freeroll entry in addition to a cash prize ranging from $10 to $4,000.
To the most dedicated and determined of Gladiators, PartyPoker will give a WSOP Main Event seat (or a $7,000 cash equivalent) for earning at least 1,200 points per day for 30 out of the 31 days of May.
Qualifying days need not be consecutive, and you start earning prizes immediately as soon as you achieve 5 points per day for at least 5 days of this month’s Gladiator promotion. You’ll earn a cash prize for accumulating at least 5 points per day for at leat 25 days of the promotion or 100 points per day for at least 5 days of the promotion. As you can see, whether you’re game is earning as many points as you can per day or playing for as many days as you can, the Party Poker Gladiator promotion has a way to reward you for it.
The parent company of Party Poker, Party Gaming is merging with Bwin. Bwin is the parent company of the Ongame network. While most of you know who Party Poker is, the Ongame network includes sites like Bwin Poker, Betfair Poker, Hollywood Poker, and RedKings Poker. Poker Scout ranks Party Poker as the number three poker room in player size and volume globally. The Ongame Network weighs in at fifth. The word is the new merged company will probably sport a new name, but it is doubtful that any poker sites will be changing.
Reports call the merger a buyout of Bwin by Party Gaming yet Bwin will somehow have controlling interest of over 51%. I see the words “reverse takeover” bandied about but that is for financial types. To put the merger in perspective, if Ongame and Party Poker started being listed together on Poker Scout, they still would be a distant third to Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker.
Many view the merger as positioning to be ready when the US market opens up to regulated online poker some time in the distant future. With all the talk in committee hearings of excluding operators who have taken US players in the past, this may be the strategy. As far as we know, Bwin has never been in the US market, while Party Poker was one of the first big poker sites catering to US players before their abrupt departure in 2006.
From a player standpoint, there should not be any unrest or uncertainty regarding the merger. I am not an insider on this deal, but I doubt anything outward, player-facing will change on any of the sites involved.
The Party Poker Monthly Million took a seasonal turn recently for Spring, with an additional Spring Million added to the calendar. Now the site is doing the same for Summer with a special Summer Million tournament coming up on August 7, 2011, with another guaranteed $1 million prize pool.
