PokerStars continues to modify its games and policies since its purchase by Amaya Gaming earlier this year. The most recent announcement is about changes that will be made to the Tournament Leader Board (TLB) system starting in 2015.
Currently, there are three leader boards, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly. Players can earn points on each by finishing in the top 15 percent of any qualifying multi-table tournament. Most standard tournaments count. If you’re hopping into good, old $100 freezeout or the like, you will have the chance to earn points. The ones that don’t count towards the leader board standings include satellites, shootouts, heads-up tournaments, restricted-entry tournaments, private tournaments, VIP freerolls, and Sit-and-Go’s with fields below 40 registrants. Points are ultimately calculated based on the place of finish, size of the field, and buy-in.
Weekly TLB’s run Sunday to Sunday and count only a player’s best ten points results. The player who wins the TLB receives the opportunity to take on a member of Team PokerStars Pro in a heads-up match for $1,000 (the player does not have to put up any money). If the Pro wins, the $1,000 gets added to the next Weekly TLB prize pool.
The Monthly TLB counts a player’s top 20 results. The top 1,000 points earners split more than T$40,000; the winner receives T$2,000.
The Yearly TLB uses the top 100 results to calculate each player’s score. At the end of the year, only the top ten players receive prizes. The winner gets a $50,000 PokerStars Passport, which can be used to enter any PokerStars-sponsored live tournament any of PokerStars’ many online tournament series. A total of $200,000 in PokerStars Passports are awarded to the ten winners.
Starting in 2015, the Weekly TLB will remain exactly the same, but the Monthly and Yearly leader boards will receive significant makeovers.
Rather than twelve monthly leader boards, there will be just three Summer Leader Boards for June, July, and August. PokerStars has not specified what the prizes for each month will be, but they will add up to $100,000 each month for a total of $300,000. Considering the current Monthly TLB prizes add up to $531,600, that’s a steep drop-off, though as it is condensed to a quarter of the year, that was probably to be expected.
The Yearly TLB will see completely different prizes and will expand the list of winners from ten to forty. Whereas the total value of the Monthly prizes is way down, the value of the Yearly prizes (as determined by PokerStars) is way up, from $200,000 to $450,000. The top three is the place to be; they will win cash prizes of $35,000, $25,000, and $15,000, respectively. Everyone in the top ten will win up to one year’s worth of entries into PokerStars’ famous Sunday Million. All forty players will receive $5,000 in major online tournament tickets and entry into a private (I assume it’s just for them) $75,000 freeroll.
So there it is. It appears that PokerStars is encouraging players to really go for the gold on the Yearly YLB, putting more money into the prizes and expanding the list of winners (it is up to the players to determine if the prizes are worth it as compared to this year). It also looks like in condensing the Monthly TLB and greatly increasing the prize values in the months that do remain, PokerStars is trying to boost its traffic during the summer, a time of year that traditionally sees online poker participation dip.
