Pokerstars $5,200 Turbo Event Easily Tops Guarantee
Published on February 17th, 2019 3:29 pm EST
Earlier this week, a number of high stakes tournament pros, led by "Giraf Ganger", announced that they would be boycotting today's $5,200 Turbo Series event on Pokerstars. The reason for the boycott? Pokerstars recently announced that scheduled tournaments would pay out a lower amount of reward points for every €1 in fees paid. Instead of earning 100 reward points for every €1 in tournament fees paid, tournament players now earn just 45 points for every €1 in tournament fees paid.
Many high stakes regulars feel that Pokerstars has gone too far with rake increases and changes to their rewards program.
partypoker jumped into the fray as well, offering a $5,200 PKO event with a $1 million guarantee on just a few days notice. In scheduling the tournament, partypoker noted that they don't charge rake on the bounty element of their PKO tournaments.
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So what happened? Did Pokerstars suffer an embarrassing defeat? Did everybody move over to partypoker for the day?
In the end, both sides can claim victory.
Pokerstars' $5,200 event ended up with a total of 187 entries, creating a prize pool of $935,000. This easily topped the $750,000 guarantee.
Despite the fact that many of the top high stakes tournament regulars were boycotting the event, the tournament ended up with a total of 160 unique entries and 27 re-entries. In the early stages of the tournament, the possibility of a very large overlay loomed large, and this resulted in many players late-regging the tournament.
partypoker was an even bigger winner on the day, as their hastily organized tournament looks as though it will top its guarantee of $1 million. As of the time that this article was written, a total of 188 entries had been entered into the event, topping the field size for Pokerstars' event. There are multiple levels of late registration left in the event, which means that the tournament should end up topping its guarantee.
In addition, partypoker scored a great deal of goodwill for hosting the $1 million guarantee on short notice, which leaves them as the big winner on the day.
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Will the boycotts continue? Will Pokerstars make changes?
Based on today's numbers, I don't see Pokerstars backing down in this fight.
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Filed Under: Online Poker Rooms
