The Party Poker Monster and an Old School Beat Down

The Party Poker Monster! AHHHH Don't let it get me! No it's not a mythical beast that eats online dollars and spits fiery aces at your fleeing pocket kings; it's a series of "freerolls" on Partypoker.com. A freeroll is a tournament that costs nothing to enter, but has "valuable" prizes to be won. These prizes are almost always cash prizes, but sometimes there are things like entries to big tournaments, various goodies, or even cars (like Ferraris and Porches) to be won. Some of these tournaments are open to literally anyone who wants to enter and are offered as a promotion to get new players to join or to get existing players to log in and start playing (most people once they start will play more than one game at a time or continue to play after they go broke in the freeroll). To play in other free rolls (the good ones) you have to qualify by playing normal games a certain amount in a given period of time.

Party Poker has come up with something a little different which is somewhat complicated, but should be profitable. I'll try my best to explain it and hopefully any of you poker players out there will be able to see the value. The first step is to win your way into the "$100,000 weekly freeroll." There are three ways to get into one of these events. The rarest way is to be playing in a "monster jackpot" game when someone hits a "bad beat jackpot." Everyone who is playing the same game at the same limit at that time wins an entry into the weekly freeroll. The second way in is to finish in the top 3 of a few designated tournaments. In addition to winning whatever they normally would win (except something like 8% of the prize pool goes to the final monster prize pool which I'll get to in a minute) these lucky few also win an entry into the weekly freeroll. This is also pretty tough. The third and easiest way is to win a Monster single table tournament. $5 from every player goes to the final monster prize pool and the rest of the tournament plays out normally with the winner getting an entry into the weekly freeroll. Confused yet?

So let's say you've won your way into one of the weekly free rolls which allow a maximum of 8000 players to enter. They're giving away $100,000 and there are probably going to be 8,000 players so an entry to this tournament is only worth as much as a free buy-in for a $12.50 tournament. Not too exciting. But, the top 2000 players in each of the weekly freerolls win an entry into one of the $1,000,000 monthly freerolls which will also have a max of 8000 players. So making to the top 2,000 in the weekly is worth about $125 in equity. Now we're getting some where. But wait there's more, and this is where it gets really interesting. If you finish in the top 1,000 of any monthly freeroll you get entered into the Monster Final. Do you remember the money from the bottom level that I said was getting added to the monster final prize pool? Well in the Monster Final that's what everyone will be playing for. They "seeded" this prize pool with $5,000,000 and after 3 weeks it's up to about 9.5 million dollars. If everything stopped right now an entry into the Monster Final would be worth over $1,000 in equity. But, there are 32 total weekly freerolls (with 29 left to go) and 7 monthly freerolls so there's lots of time to keep adding to the prize pool. It looks like the final could have a prize pool approaching $50,000,000 if the pace stays the same (and I think it will increase as more people do the math and realize how big this thing could be). To my knowledge the biggest prize pool in online history was the main event of last years World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) which was just over $3,000,000. The largest prize pool in poker history was this years WSOP main event which was around $87,000,000, followed by last years WSOP main event at just over $56,000,000 and the 2004 WSOP main event at around $25,000,000. It looks like this thing could be a piece of poker history, but I get the sense that right now no one cares about it and most of the good players out there aren't going to bother with it (there's a lot of leg work at the begining and no guarentees that it will lead to anything).

So far I've missed the cut in the two weekly tournaments I've played (I went broke with big pocket pairs in both) and I didn't bother to qualify for one since I was at E.B. and Jean's wedding. My wife Jen, on the other hand, finished 675th in today's weekly tournament so she'll be in the $1,000,000 monthly qualifier for sure. I've got 3 more shots before the first monthly event goes off so I still like my chances to get in.

Now for the old school beat down portion. I realized this morning that I didn't have any entries to the weekly events lined up so I sat down at 10:30 a.m. knowing I had until 1 p.m. to win one. Although they offer Monster single tables with various buy-ins the only ones that seemed to be running were of the $11 and $6 variety which were going off about every 90 seconds. So I jumped into 6 of the $11's. I'd forgotten how badly low limit players play and after the dust had cleared, I'd ended up with three 1st's and a 3rd. I've been running kind of bad lately so if felt nice to really beat down some weak competition and now I've got my weekly entries for the next few weeks lined up. Hopefully I'll be able to make it to the Monster Final.