The ESPN Poker Club has long been an excellent resource for poker fans on the net. From blog and columns to schedules and live coverage, they’ve been a solid part of the poker community, and really the only area letting them down was their very sub-standard free play poker client. That all changed this month when the ESPN Poker Club and online poker giant PokerStars launched their new partnership, which saw the latter providing their industry-leading play money software for the former. To celebrate this successful joining of forces, the ESPN Poker Club is hosting a freeroll with entry to a PokerStars NAPT Main Event up for grabs.
As we reported in an article earlier this month, the ESPN Poker Club and PokerStars deal has been in the pipeline for a while now, and the transition to the new software was scheduled to take place this month, coinciding with ESPN’s live coverage of the World Series of Poker November Nine. While the new software launched a little later than we expected, it’s here now and it’s pretty much everything we hoped for: a skin of the PokerStars.net client. Of course if you’re interested in playing for real money you’ll have to stick to the real deal at PokerStars.com, but otherwise the client now downloadable from the ESPN Poker Club is very solid indeed, especially when it’s giving you the chance to play in the NAPT for free.
The PokerStars North American Poker Tour is a series of tournaments that, like the European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour, is filmed and later played back on television for the fans to enjoy. There are a variety of stops all around North America, each sporting some tournaments which culminate in a main event. The tournaments tend to draw large crowds, perhaps because they’re televised, which means that the prize pools grow accordingly, making them very worthwhile tournaments to play indeed.
So how can you be the lucky guy that’s sitting there at an NAPT Main Event at no cost? It’s pretty simple, and your first step is going to the ESPN Poker Club and becoming a member, then downloading their new software. Now you just need to show you’ve got what it takes to outlast a field of fellow hopeful poker players. The freeroll tournament takes place on Sunday November 28th (yes, that’s this weekend!) and kicks off at 8pm ET. There are no restrictions on entry, so you’re entirely free to go and create an ESPN Poker Club account and register right now.
Quite aside from the chance to win yourself a seat at an NAPT Main Event, the ESPN Poker Club is well worth checking out if you enjoy play money games. The PokerStars software that they’re using is quite simply the best in the world, and you’ll be playing on the largest network of players, meaning that you’ll never have trouble finding a game, even it’s somewhat obscure. The nice thing about them using PokerStars software, too, is that when you feel ready to make the plunge, the real money client is almost identical.