- In the dot-com international market, Winter Series boasts $40 million guarantee prize pool across 240 tournaments.
- In the European segregated market, €20 million is guaranteed across nearly 300 tournaments including a €2 million guaranteed Main Event.
- In the Indian market, PokerStars will award more than 1.6 Crore ($223,260) in its first-ever edition of Winter Series.
The world’s leading online poker site PokerStars has announced the schedule and overall guarantees for its next big online tournament series, Winter Series.
Starting just two days before Christmas, the second edition of Winter Series will award over $40 million in guaranteed prizes over a period of 16 days across its dot-com international market.
In terms of total guarantees, it is 60% larger than last year’s event. It is now in the same ballpark as the operator’s flagship series, WCOOP and SCOOP.
The expanded schedule is no surprise. The inaugural Winter Series last year was a runaway success for the operator. It attracted more than 1.3 million total entries from 203,000 unique players. In total, it paid out a little over $38 million, smashing its original guarantee by 52%.
Following on from this success, PokerStars has not only increased the overall guarantees but also increased the number of events, from 152 last year to a staggering 240 individual tournaments this time around. The average guarantee per event is $167,000, up fractionally on the $164,000 last year.
Like the previous edition, there will be four separate buy-in tiers for each event—micro, low, medium, and high stakes—targeting players of all bankroll levels. Buy-ins start as low as $0.55 and go up to $5200.
In addition to the $40 million prize pool, PokerStars is touting other guaranteed tournament prizes over the festive period, including the Sunday Millions, and regular High Roller Club tournaments. This takes the total tournament prize pool over the next few of weeks to $85 million, the company says.
“We hope that they will enjoy the schedule that we concocted for them, with more than $85 million guaranteed across the whole of PokerStars during the Series, including $40 million thanks to the Winter Series alone,” said Severin Rasset, Director of Poker Innovation and Operations at The Stars Group.
