Single Day 1 flight per day
Sunday has long been the most important day of the week for online poker tournaments, with the biggest tournaments at each poker room contested at the close of the weekend. Starting this coming weekend, however, online poker Sundays will get a little bit quieter, as partypoker has reworked its flagship partypoker MILLION weekly tournament.
The tweaks are simple, yet significant. The partypoker MILLION remains a phased tournament, meaning it has multiple Day 1s that feed into the event’s final day. Instead of those opening flights occurring every couple hours, however, there will now be just one Day 1 per day.
All Day 1s end after Level 20, upon which everyone with chips remaining takes those chips to the final day. These are not satellites – chip stacks do not reset upon advancement. Players can always buy-in to a subsequent Day 1 flight if they bust out or they are not satisfied with the stack they will have.
Day 1 fields keeping pace so far
That obviously means that there are fewer chances to qualify for the final. As one would expect, the fields are larger for the new, daily Day 1s. Monday’s Day 1 attracted 220 entrants. The six Day 1s each day last week, for comparison, had fields mostly in the mid-to-low double-digits. Only one before Friday eclipsed 100 players. Several on Friday and Saturday did, but the weekend is always going to bring out more players.
With late registration now closed, Tuesday’s Day 1B has eclipsed 315 entries. Interestingly, that is almost exactly the same number of entries as all of the flights last Tuesday. The six Day 1s on June 2 added up to 317 entries.
Final day pushed to Monday
The other major change is that the partypoker MILLION final day is now on Monday at 13:30, rather than Sunday. Partypoker partner Rob Yong said in a quick video that the day was moved so that the blind levels could be slowed down to 20 minutes from the previous 12 minutes.
Each of the daily Day 1 flights also begins at 13:30 and has 15-minute blind levels. The one exception is the last Day 1 of the week on Sunday, which 10-minute levels and starts at 18:00.
Everything else is essentially the same. The partypoker MILLION still costs $215 to enter and has a $1 million guaranteed prize pool.
The poker room has also brought back the Micro and Mini. They parallel the MILLIONS, with all flights and the final day running at the same time. The difference is simply the stakes. The Micro has a $2.20 buy-in and a $15,000 guarantee. The Mini has a $22 buy-in and a $100,000 guarantee.
Both are also awarding a World Poker Tour seat to the winner; $1,050 value for the Micro winner and a $3,200 value for the Mini victor.
