Last week, the flagship “dot com” PokerStars site launched its Christmas Festival promotion, so this week, it was PokerStars New Jersey’s turn to start the holiday giveaway season. The PokerStars NJ Christmas Festival will run November 28th through December 28th, split into five parts.
All-In Shootout Freerolls
Each Sunday through Christmas, PokerStars will host an All-In Shootout Freeroll at 20:00 ET, featuring a $15,000 prize pool. These types of tournaments are actually pretty stupid, as they are just lottery tickets wrapped in a poker tournament package, but hey, they are free and you can win money, so go for it.
To qualify, players must play in any real money poker games and earn 10 VIP Player Points (VPPs). Both cash games and tournaments count. When the challenge has been completed, the player will automatically be registered in the next All-In Shootout Freeroll.
For those who have never played an all-in shootout tournament before, you literally don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to be logged in. In one of these tournaments, the software automatically puts everyone all-in pre-flop on every hand. Since it’s a shootout, each table will play until one player remains (which will probably take one to three hands). Once one player is left at each table, they will combine into new tables and so on and so forth until the tournament is over.
Mega Cash Bonus
At first I thought this was going to be lame, like a normal, old bonus, but this is actually pretty nice. Once per week during the promo, anyone who deposits $30 or more using the bonus code “CASHMEGA” (no quotes) will receive cash free and clear. No playthrough requirements, no waiting to get the money. Most of the time, the bonus will only be $5, but that’s still a free $20 if you do it all four weeks, and the bonus could be as high as $10,000.
The probabilities of the bonuses (bonii?) are as follows:
$10,000 – 0.040%
$5,000 – 0.060%
$1,000 – 0.120%
$100 – 0.500%
$20 – 2.500%
$10 – 26.78%
$5 – 70.00%
Carnival of Tournaments
This is a bunch of tournaments. From December 5th through December 18th, the Daily Bigs and the Hot Turbos on the regular PokerStars schedule will have their guaranteed prize pools increased by 25 percent Monday through Friday, 50 percent on Saturdays, and 100 percent on Sundays. Also during that same period, there will be Carnival Variety tournaments added to the schedule.
During the daily Nightly Stars tournaments December 5th through December 18th, the poker room will randomly drop a total $10,000 in tournament tickets on players.
At the end of this tourney period will be the $200 buy-in, $100,000 guaranteed Carnival of Tournaments Main Event.
Milestone Hands
The promo that has always stuffed the tables full on Pokerstars.com, PokerStars NJ will rev up a Milestone Hand promotion from December 19th through December 28th. Every 5,000th cash game hand (not counting Zoom and heads-up), all players dealt into the hand will win $30 cash.
