You know what? Before I go to sleep tonight, I feel like writing another article about PokerStars. Let’s keep it lighter this time, though, ok? This week, the world’s largest online poker room introduced a both a new promotion and a new tournament series: CardHunt and the Mountain Series, respectively.
Let’s start by talking about CardHunt, a promotion that unnecessarily takes two words and smooshes them into one. CardHunt is another one of those nothing promotions that aims to keep players clicking buttons in the hopes of a reward, much like many of the mobile games the kids have on their cellular telephones these days.
Each day from March 23rd through April 15th, PokerStars will present each player with an 18 to 20 piece puzzle in their Challenges window. Every piece is represented by a playing card. Players must “hunt” down the cards in Hold’em or Zoom cash games of stakes $0.05/$0.10 or higher (heads-up games do not count). When a player wins a hand with hole cards (one or both) that are in the puzzle, the puzzle pieces corresponding to those cards will be automatically collected. One the entire puzzle is completed, the player will win a cash prize.
The vast majority of the time – 90 percent to be exact – the cash prize will just $1 or $2.50. Thus, the CardHunt promotion is clearly targeting the casual players. Prizes go up to $5,000, but the chances of hitting $50, $500, or $5,000 are just 0.0555 percent combined. Hey, if you’re going to play cash games, might as well see what you can do with those puzzle pieces. Just don’t try too hard to win a hand with 3-9 offsuit just because you need to complete your puzzle to win a buck.
The Mountain Series is a tournament festival running from April 7th through April 10th. It will feature ten tournaments, each named after a mountain and each with an escalating buy-in. The cheapest, Sugarloaf, is an $11 tourney with a $100,000 buy-in that kicks off the Mountain Series. The festival will conclude with, of course, the Mount Everest Main Event, a $1.5 million guaranteed tournament with a $2,100 buy-in. In all, there is more than $4 million in guaranteed prize money. And that’s really about it. No leader boards, no second chance tourneys, nothing like that. Just ten tournaments spanning four days. The PokerStars website has all the relevant schedule details.
Now wasn’t that more fun than talking about Amaya’s CEO and his alleged funny business in the financial markets? Yeah, it is.
