Full Tilt Poker announced Friday that is making every tournament on its schedule a guaranteed prize pool tournament, a first for the online poker industry. The new schedule began yesterday, allowing players to enter tournaments with the confidence that a minimum prize pool will always be reached.
In a press release, Full Tilt Poker boasted that at least one guaranteed tournament will launch every ten minutes with up to 225 hosted every day. While the exact schedule of events for any poker room constantly changes, Full Tilt claims it will run “…28-30 Rush tournaments, 15-20 multi-entry events, 10-15 re-entry tournaments, and 6-8 multi-chance tournaments per day.”
“Full Tilt Poker’s scheduled tournaments already offer round-the-clock action every day of the week with a wide range of buy-ins and guaranteed prize pools to choose from,” Full Tilt’s Head of Marketing, Sarne Lightman said. “The new schedule is another market first offering our players the only fully guaranteed schedule of any online site.”
Looking at the weekly schedule, most of the new guaranteed tournaments feature low buy-ins and corresponding small guarantees. Tournaments with buy-ins of $1 + $0.10 and $2 + $0.20 are quite common, as are guarantees of just $100 to $500. Several of these micro buy-in tournaments do have guaranteed prize pools that reach four-figures, though, so they could be excellent opportunities for low-rollers to take a shot at building a bankroll.
The largest daily guarantee appears to be the “Tyrannosaurus Rex” tournament which starts at 15:00ET and features a $25,000 guarantee for a $150 + $13 buy-in. The absolute biggest tourneys tend to run on Sunday, including the $200 + $16 “$350,000 Guarantee,” which runs at 13:30ET.
The total guaranteed prize pools will total more than $25 million in the month of March.
Full Tilt Poker also announced an upcoming facelift for its tournament lobby and two, new, yet-to-be-revealed “unique tournament formats.”
Full Tilt has made a nice comeback after Black Friday and the subsequent player funds scandal that forced it to shut down for over a year. It re-launched in November 2012 after being purchased by Rational Group, the parent company of Full Tilt’s chief rival, PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker immediately found its way back into the second spot in PokerScout.com’s cash game traffic rankings, where it had been firmly entrenched before the scandal. It currently has a seven-day average of 4,000 cash game players with a peak of over 7,200 in the past 24 hours. PartyPoker, with the recent addition of bwin.com, is in third position with a seven-day average of 3,200.