PokerStars US has launched an innovative tournament promotion dubbed Monday Jackpot that randomly drops casino prizes and boosts guarantees each time it hits.
The new promo started yesterday and is scheduled to run every Monday in all three states in which PokerStars operates — New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The new Weekly Progressive Guarantee tournament is another clever tournament promotion in which the operator increases the guarantee each time its target is met.
This means the players’ turnout in the tournament’s last edition will decide how high the guarantees can go for future editions.
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Furthermore, random drops will give away Casino prizes to incentivize players to register early in the tournament. In the first two hours, one table will be randomly selected, and over $1000 in Casino prizes will be distributed to the players weekly.
The Monday Jackpot is structured as a 9-handed tournament that allows unlimited entries, with each player receiving 10,000 as the starting stack and the blinds going up every eight minutes. The buy-in for the event has been set at just $10.
In New Jersey & Michigan where the operator merged the two player pools recently, the guarantee is set at $5000, while in Pennsylvania, which is still a standalone network, the guarantee there is set at $3000.
How much the guarantee will increase should the target be met is unknown. The inaugural edition on February 27 attracted enough players in both markets to have the joint network’s guarantee boosted for the next edition.
The NJ/MI tournament drew 879 entrants (571 unique, 308 re-entries), creating a total prize pool of almost $8000 and quickly smashing its guarantee by 60%. The counterpart PA edition pulled in 477 entrants (340 unique, 137 re-entries), amassing $4340.70 in the prize pool and exceeding its guarantee by 45%.
The second installment will take place on March 6 and is expected to have guarantees boosted by at least $1000.
The Monday Jackpot tournament was first introduced in PokerStars’ Italian market last year. There, the operator ran the tournament every month, featuring the same buy-in but with a guarantee of €50,000. The tournament also ran as a PKO instead of a vanilla form.
It started with €50,000 but grew to a sizeable €120,000 before being dropped back to five figures in November. Last Sunday, the tournament ran as part of the ongoing Carnival Series with €80,000 guaranteed prize money. The room also gave away around €5000 in randomized Casino prizes.
- Play one hand & get $150 in bonus play funds
- Top-quality mobile app
- Best online MTT schedule
Progressive Guarantee is Not a New Concept
The concept of a “progressive guarantee,” or increasing the prize pool once the guarantee is met, is not entirely new. In the past, offshore US-facing online poker networks such as WPN and Merge Gaming launched Progressive Prize Pool Tournaments, where tournament guarantees increased the following day or week every time a guarantee was met.
WSOP ran the Keep It 100 tournament in NJ/NV in 2020 with a similar concept and accompanied it with a Progressive Freeroll — adding $5000 to the prize pool each time its $100k guarantee was met.888poker, in the dot-com market, attempted a unique idea that had never been tried before. Its Rake or Break tournaments in 2019 did not have any guaranteed prize pools — instead, had a target prize pool set by the room before the start of the tournament and visible to all players in the tournament lobby.
If the tournament failed to reach its target prize pool, every player received the amount of the tournament fee they paid. But should the tournament meet its set prize pool, the target would increase by 10% the following week. But the idea did not turn out to be popular, as the format had to be discontinued soon after it first launched.
The next Monday Jackpot tournament in each US client: PokerStars NJ, PokerStars MI, and PokerStars PA is scheduled for March 6 with boosted guarantees.
