Full Tilt Poker is pulling out all the stops this week, doubling the guarantees on its tournaments to the tune of $30 million. The unique promotion resulted in one of the largest $1K Mondays ever held.
Officially dubbed Double Guarantees Week, the action at Full Tilt Poker is expected to be quite hectic between now and Sunday. Although Full Tilt Poker offers tremendous tournaments with hefty guaranteed prize pools normally, the purses will be doubled this week.
The $1K Monday, which normally features a $300,000 prize pool, was doubled as a part of the promotional week. As a result, it drew a humongous field of 1,454 entries. This ensured that the guarantee of $600,000 would be cracked; by the end of late registration in the event, the prize pool was $1.4 million, an amount that even the top weekend tournaments in the online poker industry sometimes don’t achieve.
Previous installments of the $1K Monday have drawn solid numbers, but nothing compared to what occurred last night. By comparison, last week’s event drew 373 players for a prize pool of $373,000, and the last tournament in 2010 drew 361 players.
Last night’s $1K Monday was a multi-entry tournament, which allows players to enter up to four times. This led to some top players making their way to the virtual felt, including live pros Allen Cunningham, Andy Bloch, and Carlos Mortensen along with online superstars like Dan “jungleman12” Cates, Luke “FullFlush” Schwartz, Carter “ckingusc” King, and Shaun Deeb playing their allotment of four entries.
Early Tuesday morning, the long night of work paid off for Deeb. He took home the first place prize of $312,610. As he accepted congratulations from many on Twitter, Deeb let people know he was ready to celebrate when he Tweeted, “Oh nice rivers. New best score $312kish, was pretty awesome ft, celebrating with booze.”
Guaranteed tournaments running during the day are drawing a wealth of players. A $24 Double Stack No Limit Hold’em tournament that normally guarantees $19,500 had 2,173 entries (also a multi-entry tournament) for a $39,000 prize pool. Another multi-entry daily tournament, a $23,500 guaranteed event with a $100 buy-in, was doubled to make a $47,000 prize pool. This event had 671 entries, with late registration was running, and looks to be on its way over 800 at the time of writing.
Since the announcement of the multi-entry format, a healthy debate has arisen on several popular poker forums. Despite the number of jokes regarding players who had previously been punished for multi-accounting, much of the discussion focuses on whether those who buy in multiple times have an edge.
Also debated is whether the latest innovations from Full Tilt Poker, including Rush Poker and multi-entry tournaments, are deviating from what some traditionalists would consider to be the true nature of poker. TwoPlusTwo poster “BallaToBe” stated this when he wrote, “FTP is turning itself into a playground and not a serious site.”
If the rest of Full Tilt Poker’s Double Guarantees Week draws like the $1K Monday did, then expect tremendous fields for two of the site’s top events. At 5:00pm ET on Sunday, the $750,000 Guaranteed will be worth a whopping $1.5 million. The Sunday Mulligan, normally worth $200,000, will offer a $400,000 prize pool.
Visit Full Tilt for more information.
