Some old, some new
As the live poker tournament world begins to inch toward normality, PokerGO has announced the launch of a new live poker tour called the PokerGO Tour. Along with the Tour comes a new player ranking system, with $100,000 on the line for the season’s points leader.
PokerGO has revealed five live Tour stops, but they only comprise a fraction of the promised 150 tournaments that will make up this new endeavor. The opener is the 2021 U.S. Poker Open from June 3 to June 14 at the PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas.
“The PokerGO Tour events will include the world’s most challenging high stakes events in the world, bringing poker front and center in the world of sports in a way that has never been done before,” said PokerGO president Mori Eskandani.
July brings a new poker festival, the PokerGO Cup, from July 1 to July 10. PokerGO calls this a “major,” consisting of eight events, including the $100,000 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event. Two days after the end of the PokerGO Cup is another new entry, the PokerGO Heads-Up Championship. Just 32 players will compete for the one-on-one title and the largest cut of the $3.2 million prize pool, which would imply a $100,000 buy-in.
This fall come two young, but already quite popular, returning originals from PokerGO: Poker Masters and the Super High Roller Bowl. Poker Masters is made up of a dozen tournaments, running September 13 to September 24. The top performer, in addition to the money he or she will make in the events, will win the purple jacket, similar to how the winner of golf’s The Masters wins a green jacket. The Super High Roller Bowl will start on September 26 and come with a whopping $300,000 buy-in.
PokerGO taking its own rankings path
As for the new player ranking system, PokerGO’s seems to work a little differently than others that we have seen. It is not explained very well in the company’s news release, but what it looks like is that players earn points – from 10 to 1,500 – based on how much money they win in a tournament and how large the buy-in is. The higher the buy-in, the fewer the points.
Contrast that with other ranking systems like, say, the Global Poker Index, which generally award points based on finishing position, size of the field, and buy-in. But in those rankings, the higher the buy-in (if it is used in calculations), the more points a player earns. So why in PokerGO’s system is it the opposite? It could just be that the higher the buy-in, the smaller the field is assumed to be. But then it would make more sense to just use the size of the field as a factor, not buy-in.
It could also be because PokerGO doesn’t want to give an additional advantage to the deep-pocketed players who can afford the high roller buy-ins. The buy-in tiers are $10,000+, $25,000+, and $100,000+.
