Browse > Home / Poker News / The Future of Sunday Guaranteed Tournaments

The Future of Sunday Guaranteed Tournaments

April 19, 2011

Although there are US poker sites with guaranteed tournaments still open to US players, without US players, the weekend big money guaranteed tournaments at PokerStars saw some of the lowest prize pools in years. Without US players, PokerStars knew they couldn’t make their usual guarantees, so in anticipation of the diminished traffic, they lowered them. This made for a very unusual Sunday like online poker has not seen in a long time with no US players in the winner spots.

At PokerStars, the Sunday Warm-Up was the first to show drastic drops. This is a $215 No Limit Hold ‘em event that typically promises a $750K guaranteed pot. However last weekend, it was reduced to $500K. The player field was less about a thousand from the week before (from 4,634 to 3,737). The prize pool the week before was almost $930K. This past Sunday, it was just under $750K, and while 675 players were paid the week before, only 540 players were paid this week. While these numbers aren’t terrible, they do exhibit a non-US player field that may in fact never see US traffic again. However, there are other online poker sites that take US players, and these poker sites have guaranteed Sunday tourneys as well, just not as big, but definitely just as competitive and exciting.

PokerStars’ Sunday Million was about the same, reduced from $1.5 million to $1 million and it saw about 2,000 players less than the previous week. This is the story now and without US traffic, it’s just the way it will be from now on. The other online poker sites that are still accepting US players will have to prepare to pick up the slack on Sundays.

Written by Bea · Filed Under Poker News 

Comments

Comments are closed.