Players Go Deep at PokerStars.com

PokerStars.com has always offered new and fun tournament poker events. A large variety of shootouts, heads-up matches, short-handed tables, and many other different takes on tournament poker helps keep its players coming back.

Quickly gaining popularity is one of the site's most recent offerings, found under the tournament tab, the daily (and sometimes twice a day) DeepStack events, in which players start with more than three times the amount of chips received in sit-and-gos or regular multi-table tourneys.

The blind structure is also much more generous. Starting at $5-$10, and increasing every half hour, it gives players much more time to maneuver and play their $5,000 in chips exactly how they like.

Lee Jones, PokerStars.com's roker room manager, has an idea who prefers the DeepStack tournaments.

"I think the very serious player, the student of the game, prefers this kind of event. It does make skill a greater factor," Jones says. "Of course, you pay for that in a longer time commitment."

Longer blind levels, smaller blinds, bigger stacks, and hundreds of participants naturally make for a long tournament. Even if players buy into the $109 DeepStack tourney held every Saturday - the most expensive one offered - they are surely getting their money's worth in the terms of time at the table (if they last more than a level or two).

The time commitment may be a little much for some players, but because PokerStars.com attracts so many players to its site, it doesn't seem to have a problem filling the DeepStack events with hundreds of players who must have the patience of a saint and the iron butt of a motocross racer.

A tournament with 99 players once ran for six hours and players joining tournaments with more than 800 players should expect to be at their computer for around 10 hours. More than 1,000 entrants usually translates into an 11-hour event.

The first DeepStack tournament, a $22 event that was held back in August to test the structure of PokerStars.com's World Championship of Online Poker Championship Event, was capped at 1,100 players and lasted 11 hours and 12 minutes.

"This was a test to see how long an event with 30-minute blinds and 5,000 chips would run. This was to be the structure for our WCOOP championship event and we were concerned about how long it would last," Jones says.

The $2,500 championship event, which drew 1,494 entries, lasted 12 hours, 4 minutes. Pokerstars.com's tournament directors choose the slow blind structure to crown the champion because it resembles the structure of big-time live events.

Many people don't realize how generous the blind structure are in large buy-in events, like World Series of Poker events. For example, in the WSOP's main event, players start with $10,000 in chips, blinds start at $50 and $100, and the levels last 70 minutes.

The DeepStack tournaments do a pretty good imitation of the brick-and-mortar tournaments this way. Jones says many of the DeepStack regulars play to get in practice for live tournaments.

PokersStars.com has always prided itself on the large variety of games and tournaments it provides and believe that's one of the most important components to its success.

"We believe it's crucial," Jones says. "We want to be sure that our players can come to PokerStars every day and have a huge buffet of tournament and cash game items to choose from. And I always enjoy it when a player writes me and says 'Hey - I just stumbled across this cool tournament. I didn't know you had that.'"

Jones credits a great staff, and singled out Henry Estes, the site's tournament administrator, for praise.

"He's something of an unsung hero. He prefers to work in the shadows, keeping the current events running smoothly and coming up with many of the exciting new tournament formats that PokerStars offers," Jones says.

To be sure, Jones, Estes, and the rest of the staff at PokerStars.com are thinking of new ways to play tournament poker.

"As to what's next on the horizon," Jones says, "we definitely have some things we're working on but we can't release details yet."

By Bob Pajich

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