As if all of you haven’t been playing enough online poker this year, how about one more gigantic tournament series to close things out? PokerStars has announced the PokerStars Blowout Series, running December 27, 2020 to January 19, 2021, and featuring 268 tournaments. The poker room promises $60 million in guaranteed prize pools the entire series.
One-third of that total is in four events, called the Big Blowout tournaments. Each of them takes place on a Sunday and each comes with a $5 million guaranteed prize pool. The Big Blowout tournaments and their buy-ins are as follows:
- December 27, 2020 – $109 buy-in
- January 3, 2021 – $215 buy-in
- January 10, 2021 – $530 buy-in
- January 17, 2021 – $1,050 buy-in
“It has been a unique year so we have created a unique series to celebrate our love and our players’ love for the game,” said Managing Director and Commercial Officer of Poker at PokerStars, Severin Rasset, in this week’s announcement. “We have a variety of buy-ins for our Big Blowout Sunday events with $5 million guaranteed, giving all players in our community the opportunity to play in these special events. We also have our New Year’s Bash on January 1st where we hope to see many players come together to ring in 2021.”
Speaking of that New Year’s Bash, it takes place on, you guessed it, New Year’s Day (oh wait, Rasset said that). The buy-in is just $11, but the guarantee is a generous $2 million.
The rest of the events have three-tiered buy-in structures, high, medium, and low, like many PokerStars tournament series do. That’s 88 events, three tourneys a piece.
And, as is usually the case with major PokerStars events, there will be plenty of ways to qualify for the tourneys. There is the Blowout Ticket Machine, which will dole out $2 million in tournament tickets from December 27 to January 16. You have to do the silly “opt-in” thing in the challenges window to be eligible (seriously, just have everyone opted-in automatically) and then play in a Blowout Series event to enter into a daily drawing.
Of course, there are also special Spin & Go’s to give players a chance to win seats into the Big Blowout events. The Spin & Go’s cost $4 and $22 and run through January 17. The top prize is a $1,050 Big Blowout buy-in. This prize can only be won once; subsequent awards will be given in tournament dollars. $22, $55, $109, $215 and $530 Blowout Series tickets can be used to enter any event or satellite. Any tickets that go unused will be converted into regular tournament dollars after the Series ends.
