October’s been a good month for WSOP.com players in Pennsylvania who love it when poker rooms over-promise and are forced to add money to the kitty. Few things make players feel better than getting extra value on their tourney buy-ins, and WSOP.com made its players feel all warm and fuzzy throughout the month with overlays that added up to more than $285K.
The WSOP.com’s Online Championship only attracted enough players to meet its guarantees in 12 of its 63 events so far. The series ends tonight with two tourneys, a $525, $25K guarantee at 6 pm ET and a $100, $20K guarantee at 7 pm ET. If October’s trend continues, players will most likely see more overlays and gain additional value in both tourneys.
WSOP.com surpassed its guarantees by $46K in a dozen events, meaning the online poker site had to lay out about $239K over the course of the fall’s Online Championship.
Missing the big ones
Only one event with a guarantee of more than $5,000 reached its promise. Sunday’s $215, $35K event attracted 339 entrants, the largest player pool in the series. With the help of 43 rebuys, the prize pool swelled to more than $76K. But, on that same day, WSOP.com was forced to overlay $45,900 in its $300, 150K guaranteed Fall Championship. KlumaN was one of the 231 players to benefit from the added dollars and relatively small field, taking down the event for $28,800 and a championship belt.
The tourneys with $75K guarantees provided the most value to players and accounted for some big misses, including a $38K overlay in a $100 event on the first day of the series on Oct. 10, and a $32K overlay in a second $100 event a week later. None of the site’s three $11, $22,222 guarantee tourneys achieved their promise during the series, missing by $12,630, $14,552, and $13,406, respectively. Marketed as “warm-up” events, the tourneys offered players a $22 add-on at the end of the rebuy period.
Pooling players and meeting guarantees
WSOP.com is also holding an Online Championship series in New Jersey and Nevada, which share player pools. So far, only one out of almost three dozen tourneys spread required the site to inject money into the prize pool when it had to add $22K to its $1,000 High Rollers PLO event on Oct. 17, the first day of the series. That event attracted 12 players who re-bought 16 times.
Just to compare the two markets, a $22,222 guarantee was held on Sunday in Nevada and New Jersey. This tourney attracted 461 players who re-bought 1,061 times with 228 add-ons, and the site still missed the guarantee by $242.
WSOP.com players in Pennsylvania who crave larger buy-ins and more than one chance at a bracelet must cross state borders to satisfy that itch. Tonight’s $525 buy-in in the largest tourney scheduled until the $1,000 WSOP.com Online Bracelet event on Nov. 21. It’s the only crack at a bracelet the WSOP is giving Pennsylvanians this year.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey and Nevada, players have six more chances to play in a $1,000 event in the Online Championship series alone, which runs until Nov. 14. And players can complete for WSOP bracelets every Sunday until Nov. 14, including in a $3,200 event on Nov. 7, and a $7,777 event on the series’ last day.
WSOP.com in New Jersey has a five-year head start on Pennsylvania, which just launched in July this year, and its shared player pools with Nevada for four of those years. While Pennsylvania gambling board members say they’re open to sharing online poker player pools, no legislation has been proposed to turn that prospect in a reality.
WSOP.com’s online poker revenue in Pennsylvania was $603,466 for September, down $216K from August. The report for October is due in mid-November.
