New Jersey’s PartyPoker is spicing things up on the online poker tournament roster. Starting on Monday, there will be a few new additions to the regular schedule. There will be three new weekly guarantees on the menu, new low-cost satellites to PartyPoker NJ’s heads-up and Sunday $50k GTD tourneys, and an increase to some guaranteed tournament prize pools.
New/Increased Guaranteed Online Poker Tournaments
The first new guaranteed event on the roster is a $2,000 GTD 6-Max NL Holdem tournament with a $75 buy-in. This new events will be found in the tournament lobby every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday night at 8:30pm.
Next up is $2,000 GTD Pot Limit Omaha tournament that will cost $25 to enter. PartyPoker NJ will be hosting this new PLO event every weekend, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at 4:30pm sharp.
Last up is a $3,000 GTD NLHE Rebuy tournament with a $35 buy-in. This new online poker tournament is slated to run every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm.
If that weren’t enough, the online poker site will also be increasing the value of one of its more popular, and relatively costly, online poker tournaments. The $3,000 GTD Turbo that runs tonight at 9:30pm will play out as normal, but as of next week, the prize pool for this event will be increasing to $4,000 GTD.
New Satellite Tournaments at PartyPoker NJ
Heads-up online poker tournaments are popular among some players, but often considered too high of a buy-in to take the risk for others. Every Wednesday, PartyPoker NJ hosts a $1,000 GTD Heads-Up event, followed by a $3,000 GTD Heads-Up tourney on Sundays. For those who don’t want to fork over the $100 buy-in, there’s a new way to harvest a seat for a fraction of the cost.
PartyPoker NJ will now be hosting satellites to both Heads-Up GTDs for $20. Only 8 seats are available in each satellite, and the excess buy-ins will be spread as the prize pool for the rest of the field. The winner will receive a seat in the corresponding heads-up event.
The online poker tournaments schedule will also include daily points satellites leading up to the poker site’s largest weekly event, the Sunday $50k GTD. Every day, a 10-points and 20-points satellite will be held. At least 15 tickets will be awarded in each satellite, catapulting the winners into the Sunday Qualifier Final, where those winners earn a seat in the Sunday $50k GTD.
Why so many changes in Online Poker Tournaments?
For the first year of New Jersey’s online poker market, PartyPoker and its network partner, BorgataPoker, were the run-away leaders in traffic via the PartyBorgata Network. That changed in January when WSOP NJ and 888Poker decided to share liquidity by pooling a portion of their player bases. By joining together, those poker sites were able to increase their weekly GTD tournament schedule, and since then, the WSOP/888 network has overtaken its rival in cash game traffic.
According to PokerScout, WSOP NJ and 888Poker are averaging a combined 240 players over the last 7 days, with peak hour traffic of 522. PartyBorgata is drawing just 180 players on average at ring games, peaking at 425. But PartyPoker’s online poker tournaments are generally the more popular between the Garden State’s poker operators. Although no official statement alludes to this fact, it’s easy enough to surmise that PartyPoker is hoping to reclaim the players who have transitioned to WSOP/888 by offering more value in its online poker tournaments.