Pacific Guaranteed Tournaments

Guaranteed prize pool tournaments are a promotional method of online poker rooms. When a poker room guarantees a prize pool,the poker room will add extra money to the prize pool until the prize pool is at least the amount they guaranteed. For example, suppose there is a $10,000 guaranteed tournament with a $100 buyin. If 300 people enter, the prize pool would be $30,000, so the guarantee does not matter. However, if only 50 people enter, the prize pool would only be $5,000. Since it is less than $10,000, the poker room would end up having to add $5,000 more to the prize pool to match the guarantee.

It seems that Pacific Poker often ends up adding money to the prize pool. An example would be a simple $6000 guaranteed tournament held today. The buyin was $15 and 327 people entered. If this had been a regular tournament, the prize pool would have been $4905. Since Pacific gauranteed a prize pool of $6,000, Pacific Poker ended up adding $1095 to the prize pool. This means that prizes for the tournament were about 22% higher because of the guarantee.

What remains to be seen is how much Pacific will have to add for their Million Dollar Guaranteed Tournament. This may end up being one of the highest layovers in tournament poker history.

Pacific Poker does not accept real-money players from the United States.

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