Author: Bart Shirley

The end of the year is a time of giving and receiving. PokerStars is generously giving players the opportunity to win their share of $40 million in the PokerStars Winter Series.

The PokerStars Winter Series will commence on Dec. 23. The series will offer 60 online events over the course of 16 days.

Well, actually, it’s a bit misleading to say that there are just 60 events up for grabs. Each of the events has four tiers – micro, low, medium, and high – that essentially quadruples the actual number of events.

The tiers are separated according to their buy-in levels. They break down as follows:

• Micro – up to $5.50
• Low – up to $55
• Medium – up to $530
• High – up to $5200

So, there’s an opportunity to hit it big no matter the size of one’s bankroll. Each event carries guarantees on all four tiers.

Notable PokerStars Winter Series events

The series will build to a fantastic Main Event on Jan. 6. The guaranteed prize pools for the four tiers of this tournament are worth nearly $4 million alone.

The Main Event will feature 8-max no-limit hold’em. The four tiers of the event are:

• Micro: $2.20 buy-in – $100,000 guaranteed
• Low: $22 buy-in – $750,000 guaranteed
• Medium: $215 buy-in – $1,500,000 guaranteed
• High: $2,100 buy-in – $1,500,000 guaranteed

If a $2,100 buy-in seems a bit steep, PokerStars is running special Spin & Gos that will award seats to the big table. For either $2.50 or $20, players can compete against two other players in a hyper-turbo winner-take-all battle for a seat or, at least, a random cash prize.

There will also be two High Roller events during the series, running Dec. 26 and Jan. 2. These events, which 8-max no-limit hold’em tournaments as well, carry a $5,200 buy-in with a $500,000 guarantee.

Even players who are down on their luck can take part in the Winter Series, thanks to the series’s special freeroll. Players who complete the appropriate challenge will earn entry to the Winter Series $25K Freeroll.

Finally, the Winter Series will offer $3,500,000 in guarantees on its selection of phased tournaments. A phased tournament is a fancy way to describe tournaments with multiple flights or Day 1s.

The great thing about them is that they can allow players to lever themselves into a huge payday, even at the lowest buy-in levels. The Winter Series micro tier of the phased tournaments has a buy-in of just $2.20, but a whopping guarantee of $250,000.

Players who want some variety in their game selection won’t be disappointed, either. Almost every conceivable variation of hold’em has its own event, and there are multiple pot-limit Omaha and no-limit Omaha Eight or Better tournaments as well.

Millions in guarantees even without the Winter Series

Of course, the Winter Series is not the only thing going on at PokerStars. In fact, there’s even more money available just in the course of normal business for the site.

Concurrent to the Winter Series, PokerStars will offer tournaments with combined guarantees totaling $45 million. Chief among those tournaments are the ever-popular Sunday Million events.

The Sunday Million is a $215 buy-in no-limit hold’em donnybrook that has been a staple of PokerStars for more than ten years. The tournament runs every weekend and carries a $1 million guarantee on its prize pool. During the Winter Series, the Sunday Million will run on Dec. 23 and Dec. 30.

PokerStars remains one of the top sources of innovation for poker, too. There are numerous games exclusive to the site, such as Zoom, Spin & Go, and Fusion.

All in all, there’s simply no reason that PokerStars shouldn’t be on everyone’s list during the holidays. Make this a winter to remember!

PokerStars has distinguished itself this year with limited-time introductions of new poker variants. It is now possible that the online poker giant will bring two of them, Showtime and Split Hold’em, back for multi-table tournaments.

In an interview with Poker Industry Pro, PokerStars Director of Poker Innovation and Operations Severin Rasset indicated that the games might reappear due to player feedback.

“Some players were disappointed that they could not find games when we turned them off, so this is something that we want to potentially offer,” said Rasset.

What are all these PokerStars variants?

So far in 2018, PokerStars has released and withdrawn three different games. All three offered different mechanics and strategies for players to attempt to master.

Split Hold’em

The first variant, Split Hold’em debuted in March 2018. The concept was relatively simple: every hand would feature two full boards of community cards – two flops, two turns, and two rivers.

Essentially, it’s an entire game of running it twice. Each board would be worth half the pot. Players could win on either board or, potentially, scoop the entire pot.

Pots in this variant would typically be larger than an average Hold’em game. Players would have less idea why an opponent bet or which boards the opponent was betting.

Split Hold’em ran until May 2018. Then, PokerStars introduced Showtime Hold’em to the masses.

Showtime Hold’em

Compared to Split Hold’em, Showtime Hold’em was less of a shift from typical gameplay. Instead, the twist would occur when a player folded their cards.

Any players who folded would have their hands revealed to the entire table, The folded hands would remain visible for the rest of the hand.

There are two ways this twist would affect the game. The first is obvious: it became much easier to understand the type of opponents at a table.

Tight players accustomed to getting paid off might get folds. Loose players accustomed to getting folds might get called more often.

The other main difference would be that the odds would need calibration. The knowledge that certain cards had or had not been involved already would be invaluable information for marginal decisions.

The game introductions keep rolling at PokerStars

Rasset’s comments coincided with the site’s withdrawal of another variant, Unfold. As with the other two formats, PokerStars ran Unfold in a six-week trial period.

In Unfold, players contributed antes to a side pot at the beginning of each hand. After the flop, a folded player could match the side pot and retrieve their mucked cards.

The best “Unfolded” hand would receive the pot. However, folded players had no shot at the main, and could take no further action after buying back in.

Amazingly, PokerStars is not finished with running new variants out for players to try. In fact, PokerFuse is reporting that the site will release two more games in 2018 – Six Plus Hold’em and Fusion.

Six Plus Hold’em is also called Short Deck, and as its name implies, the game plays with all cards under six removed. The result is a Hold’em game with a tighter range of holdings for everyone at the table.

The game made a big splash at Macau this summer, with poker pro Nick Schulman winning his first short deck tournament in July. Undoubtedly, PokerStars players have been clamoring to try it out.

PokerStars will also roll out Fusion. Fusion remains a bit of a mystery, but will combine elements of different games.

In short, players of all calibers will not fail to find something new on PokerStars. Even though it’s the largest site on earth, PokerStars doesn’t seem to be resting on its laurels.