The recent Black Friday has taken a hit on many different people and companies. U.S. players are now stuck without a secure option of playing as well as not having access to their bankrolls. Non-U.S. players are seeing their games being filled by much less participants (depending on the site) as well as having their funds in a bit of jeopardy with the overload of cash-out attempts. Poker sites, such as PokerStars, are seeing a dramatic decrease in their player pool.
An unfortunate side effect of the lesser player pool means that tournaments will potentially not have as great of a showing as before. This is the case at PokerStars.
The Sunday Majors were always known to have great turnouts at PokerStars every week. Countless players would duel it out knowing each tournament had a high guarantee in prize pool. Because of recent events, these prize pools are down tremendously. The Sunday Million, usually seen to have around 9,000 sign-ups, only had 6,475 players this week. This caused the guarantee to be at just $1 million instead of its trademark $1.5 million. The Sunday Warm-Up saw another drop of 1,000 players, making their old guarantee of $750k to only $500k. The Second-Chance and Super Tuesdays were also affected with the Second-Chance’s guarantee down to $125k from $250k and the Super Tuesday (a non-guarantee tournament) having nearly half the participants as last week.
Aside from what seems to be a lot of negatives, there are also a few positives for players. All of these tournaments still met their initial guarantees with the Sunday Warm-Up only 50 players away from the higher guarantee of $750k used in the past. On top of this, the always popular Sunday Storm was still able to reach a whopping 30,000 participants.
Some more good news, for now, deals with the SCOOP championships PokerStars offers. SCOOP stands for Spring Championship of Online Poker and involves 38 various events. As seen in years past this series has large guarantees and as of now PokerStars has yet to decrease them. This would be huge for non-U.S. players who planned to participate.
Another positive is the VPP Ring promotion at PokerStars for Central and Eastern Europer users. Players who participate in this promotion have five weeks to earn as many VPPs (VIP Player Points) as possible in attempt to finish in the top 500 and a share of the $50,000 prize pool. All players have to do is register for a dummy tournament in the PokerStars lobby between April 11 through May 1 to participate. The actual five weeks starts on April 18 and will end May 22. The way scoring works is that the top 500 players will divide their total VPP by the total VPP earned for all top 500 players. Players finishing in the top 50 receive an added bonus depending on exactly what place they finished.
For those that can, make sure to look for the silver lining. PokerStars may have taken a hit, but they are proving that their large prizes and events are not to be altered!