Thursday, April 8, 2010

CEREUS Launching Series of Innovative Poker Events

The CEREUS Network is composed of UB and Absolute Poker, two of the biggest names in the business of online poker. UB is the larger site within the network and with the cancellation of the 2010 iteration of their Aruba Poker Classic, they have decided to push several online events that will pick up some of the slack that has been left by that event’s absence from the running this year.

The first of those events is called the Perfect 10 Challenge on UB and the Trip Tens in April promotion on Absolute Poker. Although they have different names, the two sites will be sharing the leader board for the entire event.

Here’s how it works. Every single day in April will see ten tournaments being run with a buy-in of $11 each. Players can play in as many of the tournaments as they want over the month of April and at the end of the month players will take their ten best finishes in those tournaments and have points towards the leader board calculated based on those results. When all is said and done, the top 50 finishers on that leader board will get a payday based on the amount of points they have been able to accumulate.

This promotion is interesting because of the fact that it allows you to play a variable number of tournaments yet count just the ten best finishes towards the overall total. There is $100,000 in the prize pool for this promotion with the top three finishers receiving $20,000, $10,000 and $5000 respectively. Everyone that gets a prize however will get at least $500 plus the cashes from their tournaments so this is definitely a good one to go after in terms of expected value.

Don’t think it will be too easy though because you can expect to see professional players from UB vying for those top spots. Although no confirmations have been done yet, there is the possibility of players like Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth being present when the ten tournaments on the first day get underway along with the other great poker players that make up team UB.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Poker Stars Dream Job Australia Final Fast Approaching

It has been weeks since Poker Stars started their Dream Job Australia promotion and now it looks as though the first stage of the tournament will be coming to an end soon. The final for Dream Job Australia is scheduled for tomorrow (March 27th) and will begin at 4:30 PM Eastern Time.

Players that have been able to perform well on the satellite tournaments that have been running for weeks are the same players that will be able to enjoy a relatively cheap entry into the Grand Final that will be run tomorrow. However, even if you haven’t played a single satellite there is still time for you to either win your way into the final or else buy your way into it with direct buy-in cash for the final event.

The good news is that if you do the direct buy-in, performances of other players at previous satellites don’t really mean that much. This is because the Poker Stars Dream Job Australia Grand Final will send the 10 players that are left at the end to the second stage of qualification regardless of how they got to the final in the first place.

All ten of these players will be sent to Sydney, Australia, at which point Team Poker Stars Pros will quiz them on their knowledge of poker and generally help them with getting recognized and eventually selected as the final person out of the ten that should be going for this selection.

The final player that ends up being selected out of these ten candidates will be the player that receives the $100,000 contract from Poker Stars. This contract will include $5000/month as a salary as well as $40,000 to be used by the player to buy into the Australia and New Zealand Poker Tour events of their choice. They will be representing Poker Stars by wearing their gear while playing and at the end of the tournament series it is quite possible that they may walk away with a lot more than that in cold hard cash. No matter how you slice it, this is definitely a Dream Job Australia opportunity.