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, but for now things continue to be malleable. Over the weekend, partypoker changed the Cash Game Leaderboards once again, the second time it has done so in about a week.
Another tier, no more names
The most fundamental change that was made was adding another tier to the leaderboards. There are still two groups of leaderboards, one for No-Limit Hold’em and one for Pot-Limit Omaha, and both are divided into groups based on stakes.
A tier for $0.50/$1 was added to each, bringing the total number of leaderboards to 16.
partypoker also did away with the names of the different tiers, now simply labeling them by stakes.
Originally, there were four tiers for the No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha leaderboards: Micro, Low, Medium, and High. These corresponded to buy-in, but there was overlap between the Low and Medium tiers, so they were further described by stakes.
To eliminate the confusion, partypoker got rid of the buy-in distinction, defining the tiers only by stakes. It added three tiers to each game, resulting in Nano, Mini Micro, Micro, Lower, Low, Medium, and High tiers.
That wasn’t bad, but yeah, getting rid of the names was a decent idea. I mean Mini Micro and Lower? As for the extra tier, the end result is essentially the previous Medium tier being divided into two. So now we’re looking these tiers:
$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
$1 million in March
In addition to the revived tier structure, partypoker has also added a ton of money to the Cash Game Leaderboards for March. Both the No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha leaderboards will feature $252,900 in prizes each week, meaning there will be over $1 million in cash awarded this month.
Originally, each leaderboard grouping awarded about $100,000 each week. When the number of tiers was increased, the prizes went up to $180,000 each week.
Each tier pays from 12 to 21 places; the $0.25/$0.50 tier and lower all pay to 21 spots. The top prize ranges from $10,000 to $200, with the higher stakes tiers obviously (or not, I don’t know how you think) paying out more handsomely than the lower stakes.
Players earn one leaderboard point for every cashback point they earn in real money cash games. A cashback point corresponds to one dollar generated in rake. All No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha games are eligible for leaderboard points except for Short Deck and heads-up games. fastforward games do count.
On top of all that, partypoker has the ongoing Daily Cash Boom promotion. After opting-in (this shit is always opt-in, which is annoying, and this one is daily) partypoker customers just need to play a little bit for a chance at cash prizes.
Those who earn five points in cash games or fastforward win an entry into the $5K Daily Cash Boom Tournament. Those who earn two points via SPINS games get an entry into the $3K Daily Cash Boom Tournament. Each of the tourneys are all-in or fold tournaments, so while they aren’t completely luck-based, they are close to it.