The Unibet Online Series (UOS) is the first online poker tournament series from the independent operator. The premiere online poker series comes four years after the company parted ways with its former online poker provider MPN.
The UOS will have €300,000 guaranteed over a total of 84 tournaments. 28 events—each with three separate buy-in tiers—have been designed to make the events accessible to players with just about any size bankroll.
There will be nano-stakes with buy-ins under a dollar, a low-stakes tier with buy-ins up to $5, and a high stakes tier in the $25 to $50 range. Six tournaments will run every day starting at 7pm and 8:30pm.
There will be a mix of rebuy, bounty, progressive bounty and ante tournaments sitting alongside the regular freezeout Hold’em and PLO events.
The series comes to a close with a trio of Main Events which will each run across two days. The headline act is the €100 buy-in, €100,000 guaranteed Main Event—which could possibly be the largest guaranteed tournament the site has ever scheduled, so it is definitely not to be missed.
A full slate of qualifiers is already underway.
Leaderboard promotions for each of the three buy-in tiers, plus an overall leaderboard based on performance across all 84 events, will be running with a total of €25,000 earmarked as prizes.
The Competition
The UOS is giving the competition a run for its money.
Unibet’s old network MPN is currently running The Classic which comes to a close just a day before the UOS gets underway. While The Classics total guarantees are a little more ambitious—€500,000 in total prize money over the course of 52 events—its own €100 Main Event has a guarantee of only €50,000.
The new UOS is also comparable to iPoker online poker tournament series which introduced its new festival brand last year replacing the old iPOPS name. The last edition held in October 2017 guaranteed a total of €400,000 in prize money with buy-ins ranging from €10 to €100 and a €200 high roller. There were 40 events, and a €100,000 guaranteed Main Event.
The Turbo Series —formally TCOOP—from PokerStars gets underway a week before the start of Unibet’s series meaning the UOS will have to work hard to make a dent in PokerStars numbers.
On top of that, partypoker has announced the launch of a new online tournament series called KO. The $10 million knock out series will clash dates with UOS as it runs February 25 to March 4. In a similar vein to UOS, the KO Series will have five different buy-in levels: High Roller, High, Medium, Low and Micro.
Unibet’s Move from MPN
Back in 2014 Unibet made the move from the MPN network to go it alone. Estimates at the end of 2017 put Unibet’s dot-com traffic at around 750 concurrent cash game seats, making it eighth among European online poker operators, close in size to its old network MPN and around a third of the size of 888poker.
Growing from strength to strength ever since they left MPN, the parent company of Unibet, Kindred, has been slowly growing their online poker platform. 2015 saw them buy StanJames and iGaming Holding, and in 2017 they acquired rival igaming firm 32Red.
Now Unibet’s parent company plans to migrate players over to the Unibet platform and close the StanJames site. The operator is hopeful that Unibet’s independent poker platform which offers a significantly different player experience to other online poker rooms will help reactivate many dormant StanJames accounts.
“One of our main priorities is going to be having the healthiest ecology in the industry and I think that will continue to differentiate us as it’s an area where most other sites are still struggling,” said Unibets Head of Poker, David Pomroy.
The Unibet Online Series will run February 26 to March 11.
