PokerStars welcomes the Turbo Series to the New Jersey market for the first time with the series, starting this week. There will be 28 events spread across twelve days with $250,000 in guaranteed money on the line.
The Turbo Series, the fast paced tournament format formally called TCOOP, has never run in New Jersey before.
Buy-ins to the Turbo Series will start at $15. In addition, satellites and qualifiers give players a chance to win their way into the tournaments for less. There will be a mix of Turbo and Hyper-Turbo game formats as well as No Limit Hold’em and PLO games.
This is not the first time PokerStars has run a big-ticket online tournament series in New Jersey—The Turbo Series will be the tenth tournament run in the market in under two years. In fact, it will already be the second this year, with *Winter Series 2018*—12 events, $325,000 guaranteed—being held in January. Prior to that there was NJCOOP, Summer Series, NJSCOOP and City Series, which ran a year ago.
The move to rebrand TCOOP to the Turbo Series comes as a bit of a surprise move from the operator. PokerStars has worked to resuscitate various much-loved brands over the last year, including the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) and European Poker Tour (EPT). These tours were scrapped at the end of 2016, but following an outcry from players, PokerStars has brought them all back—so it is a surprise that the iconic TCOOP brand has been ditched.
What Other Tournaments Are Running at This Time?
The Turbo Series will slightly overlap with 888poker and WSOP.com’s New Jersey Poker Classic that its running until February 25.
The New Jersey Poker Classic is the second iteration of the tournament series, after it debuted in November 2017. With $800,000 guaranteed over 57 events across 17 days, it makes it one of New Jersey’s biggest online tournament series of the year. With this overlap in mind, the Turbo Series will have to work hard to compete with this offering during the first week of the tournament.
Borgata and partypoker will be running the popular Garden State Super Series (GSSS) between March 18 and 25—just a few weeks after the Turbo Series finishes—which will have a total of $300,000 in guarantees.
Shared Liquidity for Online Poker in New Jersey
Back in October the state of New Jersey announced that it reached an agreement to share online gaming liquidity with Nevada and Delaware which already share their igaming liquidity.
The deal means that operators licensed in multiple states will be able to allow players in those states to compete against each other on their platform.
The addition of New Jersey to the pool could prompt the partypoker network—which includes partypoker and *Borgata Poker*—to seek a presence in Nevada. Though the Nevada market is small in terms of population, it is a popular destination for poker players, especially during the summer months when thousands descend on Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.
In addition, with Pennsylvania expected to go live with online gaming towards the end of the year, there will be hopes that they too will become part of the US shared liquidity pool.
However, joining the shared liquidity pool may not be as straightforward as it sounds. Pennsylvania’s online gaming servers may have to be housed in Atlantic City, New Jersey due to a restriction in New Jersey’s state constitution.
The Turbo Series NJ is running February 22 to March 4.
