Dreamstime/Adam Drobiec The World Series of Poker kicks off this week, at an unusual time of year. As poker players begin their pilgrimage to Las Vegas, one of the year’s biggest events in US online poker has just wrapped up.
For the first time ever, three versions of the PokerStars Championship of Online Poker ran concurrently in New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If it could, PokerStars would make its World Championship (WCOOP) available to everyone, everywhere. However, local regulations in some jurisdictions, including the US, force it to split it up.
As things stand, there are seven such annual championships: World (WCOOP)
Southern Europe (France, Spain and Portugal – SECOOP)
Italy (ICOOP)
India (INCOOP)
The three legal US states (NJCOOP, MICOOP and PACOOP)
In the past, PokerStars has tended to run series in those three states one after the other. This time, it ran them all at once, starting on Sep. 10 and wrapping up this Monday, Sep. 27.
The WSOP is probably one major factor in that decision. Staggering the series would either have meant starting much earlier than usual, or forcing players to choose between the PokerStars series or the live series in Las Vegas.However, the series were also very similar in the composition of their schedules. That suggests a second motive for PokerStars, which is to standardize the series in preparation for combining them. Michigan expects to join an interstate poker compact with New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware by year’s end. Pennsylvania hasn’t made anything official, but is expected to follow suit. Successful series, but few surprises Legal online poker isn’t much of a novelty in any of the three states anymore. PokerStars launched most recently in Michigan, back at the end of January, but is closing in on its second anniversary in Pennsylvania, and has been in New Jersey since 2015. It’s also a veteran operator with a conservative and meticulous approach to setting its series schedules.That makes it rare to see a PokerStars series performing much better or worse than the company anticipates.The last installments of PACOOP and MICOOP beat their guarantees by a wide margin, so […]
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