The multi-table tournament leaderboard for the month of March at BetOnline has seen its prize pool boosted from $3,500 to a total of $8,500.
Play in multi-table tournaments at BetOnline (review) during March, and you can get a piece of $8,500 in special freeroll tournaments thanks to their leaderboard.
Leaderboards have been a part of online poker tournament play for over a decade. The basic idea is that tournament players don’t have the same availability for promotions that cash game players typically do, especially on the high volume side. To compensate, online poker sites like BetOnline offer up leaderboard competitions where players can compete against each other to earn points each month, and their position on the leaderboard earns them prizes. While BetOnline does this a bit differently than other online poker sites, the basic idea remains the same, and you can get a piece of thousands of dollars of value by taking part.
Three Different Leaderboards
There are three different leaderboards in the March edition of the BetOnline MTT leaderboard competition. The bronze category is for events with a total buy-in, including tournament fees (ie: the rake) worth anywhere from $0.05 to $0.99. The silver category is for tournaments with a total buy-in of anywhere from $1 to $9.99. Finally, points from all events worth $10 and up count in the gold category.
The point of having three leaderboards is so that you only have to compete against other people who play similar stakes as you. Since the value of the buy-in is one of the factors in determining how you get points (among a number of other things like how many people are in the tournament and what place you earn), it wouldn’t be fair to have people who play $0.50 tournaments up against those playing with a buy-in of $50, and BetOnline has done a good job of distributing value in a fair way.
$8,500 in Total Prizes
Instead of offering up direct payouts in their MTT leaderboard competition, BetOnline holds a set of freeroll tournaments with beefed-up prize pools for the top 100 players on each spot on the leaderboard. This means player will need to face off against each other to earn a piece of the prize pool, and that’s a bit more interesting way to do it in terms of competition and the high-paced action that multi-table tournaments are known for.
Typically the bronze tournament’s freeroll has a $500 prize pool, the silver is worth $1,000 and the gold is worth $2,000. This would be a total value of $3,500. However, for the month of March, an extra $5,000 has been added to the value of these three events. This means the new bronze event has double the prize pool at the $1,000 level, and the silver event has more than double the prize pool worth $2,500. The gold leaderboard tournament is worth $5,000 now, and that’s a pretty incredible amount of value considering only 100 people will be in the event.
On average, an entry on the bronze leaderboard is worth $10, silver is worth $25 and gold is worth $50 for these freerolls.
Terms and Conditions You Should Know
Like any other promotion, there are terms and conditions that you should know. First, there are three types of multi-table events that do not earn points for this leaderboard:
- Satellite events
- Freeroll events
- Play money events
If a multi-table event accepts US dollars as a form of payment, then you’ll get points for playing in it.
As for when the events will happen, they’ll always run on the first Wednesday of the next month. For the March leaderboard, the tournaments will happen on the first Wednesday of April, and this happens to be April 6 this time. They all run at 7 pm Eastern.
The tournaments start players with 2,000 in chips with eight-minute blind levels with no re-buys or add-ons. Players will also get a break every hour.
Comparative Value
One complaint that some players have had about this format is that coming in first place on the leaderboard is worth the same amount as coming in 100th place. There’s some value in that complaint, but BetOnline has done this intentionally. This allows players on all 100 spots on the leaderboards to earn a piece of the prize pool instead of only the players who have the biggest bankrolls or the most time on their hands, so both playing volume and tournament results are factored into your final leaderboard position, and ultimately, your final take-home prize.
