Yesterday, January 6, marked the kickoff of the PokerStars No Limit Players Championship (PSPC) – which will potentially become known as one of the brand’s most ambitious offerings in its own history.
The brand managed to give away all of its Platinum Passes, of which there were 320 in total. The inaugural event is set to take place at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) event, occurring at the Atlantis Resort & Casino located within the Bahamas. There’s already a guaranteed prize pool of $9 million and the event could potentially bring in another 500 entrants. This could turn the PSPC into the biggest event that PokerStars has ever hosted.
Yet, if you weren’t one of the fortunate players who managed to get your hands on one of those Platinum Passes, the poker room is also hosting its own online version of the event. A sort of miniature version of the live tournament, which has much the same format as well as structure. The main difference is the buy-in for this, which is a lot less at 1/1000th of the $25k buy-in for the Bahamas event. A $25 buy-in may seem more manageable for some people.
Details of the Online Event
The online event will run for the same time period of five days, between the 6th and 10th January. No rake will be charged for this event and as with the Main Event, the tournament itself is played with eight hands. Each of the players gets to benefit from a starting stack of 60,000. Blinds in the online tournament will only last for 20 minutes though, whereas the live event has 60-minute blinds in play.
Additionally, there’s a 24-hour period in which late comers can still register for the event, meaning that time is up today for that if you’re straggling behind. The last event in this online series – The Final Table – will commence on January 11, featuring the last six players.
Perhaps another stand-out difference between the two events, is that the online version of it does not feature a guaranteed prize pool. However, PokerStars has taken it upon itself to add $9,000 to the prize pool. A final note about entrants is that players from both the Czech Republic and Russia are not able to enter the online version of the tournament, potentially due to regulations within those countries.
Despite this potentially being one of the brand’s longest online poker tournaments, it’s not the first time that PokerStars has done something of this nature. Back in 2016, while the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) series was in play, a four-day event was added to it for online gamers. At that time, the tournament faced some technical issues though, which saw it run for an extra day without any breaks. Because of that, PokerStars didn’t bring it back for the proceeding two years.
