Despite Black Friday and the fact that PokerStars, Full Tilt, and UB are no longer available to Americans, PokerStars has remained one of the best Euro poker sites around. If you live in Europe, you should expect to see plenty of promotions available to you now that the US is no longer a factor.

The latest promotion for Central and Eastern Europe is known as VPP Ring. Players from this region should play cash games as much as they can in order to earn as many VIP Player Points (VPPs) as possible. You will be ranked on a leaderboard depending on how many you earn. PokerStars has a $50,000 prize pool for its top 500 players!

If you wish to participate in this promotion, search for the VPP Ring dummy tournament in the PokerStars lobby. The tournament is under “Tourney” and “Regional” and is used for registration purposes only. You can only register from now until May 1st, so be sure to do it this coming week.

The promotion started one week ago, but you still have plenty of time to catch up. Basically you have until May 22nd to rack up the VPPs at the cash tables. To do so you have to play with real money, and the higher the limits, the more you’ll earn. If you want a chance to win this leaderboard, you will need to do a few obvious things: play high action games (eg. Limit), play long hours, and play multiple tables at once.

As specified above, the top 500 players receive prize money when everything is said and done. The top 500 players split a $40,000 prize pool, and then the top 50 players split an additional $10,000.

To see where you rank on the VPP Ring leaderboard, just go to the PokerStars site by clicking one the PokerStars links on this page. The VPP Ring rankings shows both how many VPPs you’ve earned and also how much of the $50,000 prize pool you would receive if the contest were to end today.

If you are already a cash grinder, opting in for this promotion is a no-brainer. People already consider FPPs as PokerStars rakeback, so VPP Ring essentially increases the rakeback you already get. Grind hard to get to the top, and here’s to running good at the tables!