Online Poker Strategy Articles

Jon Eaton

A million dollars, every Sunday. That's right... online poker now offers players the chance to enter a weekly no limit tournament with a million-dollar prize pool guaranteed each Sunday.

PokerStars.com recently hit over 5,000 players two weekends in a row in their $215 no limit tournament, with over $1.1m in prize money both times. Their monthly $530 tournament was recently raised to a one million guarantee, yet it remains to be known if that will be raised as well. In the meanwhile, players can qualify for the weekly $215 tournament by playing new $13 and under double shootouts. They run multiple times an hour all day, every day.

These satellites are no doubt responsible for the growth of their weekly tournament. PokerStars.com has also added a new VIP points system, enabling more active users to accumulate FPP's at a faster rate. To reward players for continued patronage, PokerStars has added a VIP FPP store, allowing players to cash in their FPP's for tournament entries, travel, poker related items, and other merchandise.

PartyPoker recently has had major changes to their software. In addition to new table resizing features, their entire look and feel of the lobby has been modified. They have also added new $77 sit and goes, as well as plans for multi-table sit and goes much like PokerStars recently added. In addition to the software changes, their tournaments and sit and goes feature more chips and restructured blinds (with new antes in tournaments).

Looking at the growth trends and changes to online poker, I fully expect PokerStars to continue to grab the online poker tournament market and run with it. PartyPoker is going to be replaced by PokerStars as the most frequented online poker room, though I believe both are going to continue to lead the pack.

I kind of expect both sites to start running more online tournament series, much like the PokerStars World Championships of Online Poker (WCOOP). It wouldn't be all that shocking to me to see an online $10,000 tournament in the near future, either. I expect the WCOOP to run a $5,000 or higher buy-in event in the next two years or so as well.

Live poker, in contrast, will probably start to peak out. I think that while the prize pools will still probably be huge, I don't think they'll continue the huge boom they experienced in the past two years. Maybe the World Series will continue to accumulate more entries and add more events, but I think the tournament circuit as a whole is going to experience contraction instead of expansion.

note by gank: online poker is just in its infancy, I believe it will continue to grow and become one of the largest sports in the world. I love football, but like most people I can't throw touchdown passes but we all can play poker. I love this game.