Now featuring daily leaderboards
In March, I wrote the following: “I would suspect that partypoker is eventually going to settle on a structure for its Cash Game Leaderboards and stick with it for a while….”
I guess “a while” means about three months, as partypoker has reworked its cash game leaderboards once again (I’ve made the executive decision to do away with the first-letter capitalization I used last time). This go around, partypoker has decided to make the leaderboards a daily competition rather than weekly.
The switch to a total of $36,000 in prizes every day is simple one, but it is sneakily significant. With weekly leaderboards, the potential prize for any individual was larger. Now, the top prize, which goes to the winner of the highest-stakes leaderboard, is just $1,200. The entire leaderboard for the lowest levels is just $250. For some players, this will not be a welcome change.
The natural advantage to the move to daily leaderboards is more people will have the chance to win something. Weekly leaderboards made it incumbent upon anyone who wanted a shot to win a prize to grind as much as possible. Now, you can skip days and only miss out on cash prizes from those days. The leaderboard chase is more relaxing – it probably feels more like fun than a job now.
Total dollar amount stays consistent
The overall dollar amount, extrapolated for an entire month, is about the same as it was with the weekly leaderboards. Before this week, partypoker was doling out $252,900 in weekly leaderboard prizes, so a bit over $1 million every four weeks. With $36,000 awarded daily, the total for four weeks – or 28 days – is…a bit over $1 million.
There are still 16 cash game leaderboards in total, eight for Hold’em and eight for Omaha. The stakes tiers stay the same, as well:
$2.50/$5
$1/$2
$0.50/$1
$0.25/$0.50
$0.10/$0.25
$0.05/$0.10
$0.02/$0.05
$0.01/$0.02
In the last cash game leaderboard rework, partypoker eliminated the tier names, deciding to go with just stakes amounts. The poker room has kind of brough back names, but they are of no importance. There are now four “named” tiers: Micro, Low, Medium, and High. Each name encompasses two stakes tiers; you can probably figure out which names go with which stakes.
The games that count toward Hold’em leaderboard points include No-Limit Hold’em on both regular and Fast Forward tables. Both Pot-Limit Omaha and Pot-Limit Omaha Hi/Lo count for the Omaha leaderboards. Fixed-Limit games do not count, nor do heads-up games.
Cheaters booted in May
Fortunately the competition will be a bit easier than it was a few months ago. In early May, partypoker partner Rob Yong tweeted that the poker room banned “a number” of players for cheating their way to leaderboard riches. Yong cited cheating methods such as multi-accounting and recruiting friends to play on their accounts, though he declined to go into more detail.
The cheaters were kicked off of partypoker and their funds were seized and redistributed to the genuine leaderboard winners.
Image: World Poker Tour via Flickr