GGPoker offers poker players a special regular tournament event titled GG Masters. The tournament is comparable to options like the MILLION at partypoker and the Sunday Million at PokerStars. The online poker tournament offers a massive guaranteed prize pool of $300,000, but over the past few weeks, the event has been unable to reach the guarantee.
The GG Masters
The tournament event has a buy-in of $150, which provides a ton of value considering the prize pool amount. The format is freezeout, which means players cannot buy back in or have a re-entry, it’s a one shot deal.
On top of the event, the GG Masters features a Player of the Year leaderboard. The player who earns the most points by the end of the year will earn an ambassadorship which is valued at as much as $500,000.
The leaderboard offers prizes for the second to 10th place finishers as well. Each of these players will earn a package to the GG Masters tournaments in 2021, which as a value of $7,800.
Lack of Interest
Unfortunately for GGPoker, the Masters event has not reached its guarantee for the past four events. On January 5th, the guarantee was $250,000 and it experienced an overlay of $27,820 with 1610 players competing. The next week, on January 12th, the event offered the $300,000 prize pool and it missed the mark by $37,662 but more players competed with 1901 entries.
On January 19th, the event fell way short with a $51,600 overlay. A total of 1800 players competed in the event. The player total was back up for January 26th, with 1911 entries. However, the overlay was still $36,282.
While the overlays cost the poker site, it is not something they are overly concerned about. They continued to offer the $300,000 guarantee and do not seem to be showing any signs of lowering it for the GG Masters.
With overlays, poker brands do consider the money spent a marketing expense. They must pay to bring players in, but eventually, the goal is to drive enough traffic to ensure that the player totals stay consistent and meet the guarantee.
To drive in more traffic, the ambassadors of GGPoker have been promoting the new option on social media sites and providing giveaways. Even Daniel Negreanu got in on the action, taking to Twitter to show players how to earn a free ticket to the event, pointing out that players can access the games via tablet or smartphone.
Players can currently earn seats to the GGMasters by taking part in satellites at GGPoker. The satellites have a $15 buy-in and include step qualifiers that have buy-ins as low as $1.15. The satellites with $15 buy-ins offer from two to fifteen seats to the GGMasters depending on the time it takes place.
We shall stay tuned over the coming weeks and see how the GGMasters develops. Will the guarantees eventually be reached or will GGPoker continue to pay the overlays to meet the money needed to reach the guarantee?
