It is not every day that two competing online poker rooms work together to provide their players with the best possible product and this is still not one of those days. Two rooms, however, just happen to be offering a huge slate of tournaments this month in such a way that players will certainly benefit.
Winamax.fr, France’s leading online poker site, launched its giant Winamax Series XI on Sunday. It is not quite as big as, say, PokerStars’ annual World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) or Full Tilt Poker’s Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS), but considering Winamax is a France-only poker room, 82 tournaments and €6,000,000 in guaranteed prize pools is pretty darn nice.
There are many tournaments in the Winamax Series running every day through next Wednesday, January 14th, most of which have very low buy-ins for a series like this. With some events starting at just €5 and most costing €50 or less, it is a very affordable poker tournament series. The €150 Main Event, called the Million Event, is a No-Limit Hold’em full ring tournament. It starts Sunday, January 11th, and has, you guessed it, a one million Euro guaranteed prize pool. It is a re-entry event, but it is not specified on the schedule if that means players can re-enter each subsequent starting flight once (there are three in total) or that they can re-enter as much as they want until the registration period ends. We’re going to guess the former.
PokerStars.fr, the French-only site of PokerStars, is going to try to take advantage of the crowds that will be filling Winamax’s tables. It has launched the Vampire Party series, running January 5th through January 12th. As the name might imply, the tournaments in the Vampire Party all start very late, midnight CET at the earliest. The idea behind it appears to be to give those who bust out of a Winamax tournament another competitive tournament to enter. They are clearly in the mood to play poker, so why not help them out? The buy-ins for the Vampire Party tournaments are also low, even lower on average than those in the Winamax Series. And interestingly, while they don’t all match up exactly, many of the Vampire Party events are very similar to those on Winamax on the same day. Pretty clever.
PokerStars’ Vampire Party is significantly smaller than the Winamax Series, offering just 40 events and only €500,000 in guaranteed prize money.
Winamax.fr and PokerStars.fr are the two leading online poker sites specific to the French market, according to PokerScout.com. Winamax has a seven day average of 1,350 cash game players while PokerStars.fr has 1,000, ranking them eighth and tenth, respectively, on PokerScout’s charts. There are other French sites, but none come close to those two. PartyPoker.fr is the next largest with 650 cash game players and iPoker.fr has 500 cash game players.
