Everygame's New Tournament Poker Innovation: Surge Chips

Though it's a smaller online poker site, Everygame has never been shy about introducing new features to its games. It's time for another innovation with Everygame's new Surge Chips, which add a new wrinkle to multi-table tournaments. You can now earn Surge Chips and then deploy them at the start of certain poker tourneys to increase your starting stack!

How to Earn Surge Chips

Right now, the only way to collect Surge Chips is by completing missions that are listed in the poker lobby. As of July 26, 2025, we see three such missions available:

Surge Chips Missions

You can log in every day for a week, play any cash buyin tournament, or play any real money cash game poker hand. For each of these tasks you complete, you'll receive 1,000 Surge Chips to use later on.

Each of the missions has a timer attached to it. When this time runs down, the mission will expire. However, new missions will then appear, so it's highly likely that you'll still be able to earn more Surge Chips.

How to Use Surge Chips

You can identify tournaments that accept Surge Chips by a lightning symbol next to the name of the tourney in the poker lobby. When you open up the MTT lobby, you'll see the maximum number of Surge Chips you can use:

You Can Use up to 1,000 Surge Chips in This Tournament

When you click the “Register” button, you'll see a check box saying something like, “Redeem 1000 Surge Chips for additional 1000 starting chips.” Make sure this box is checked if you want to use your Surge Chips; otherwise, ensure that it is unchecked.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you elect to use Surge Chips in a tournament, the system will automatically redeem ALL your Surge Chips up to the maximum permitted. You do not have the option to redeem less than the max unless your balance of Surge Chips is less than the cap, in which case all of your Surge Chips will be exchanged.

What Tournaments Allow the Use of Surge Chips?

There are a variety of tournaments with buyins between $1.10 and $26 that let you deploy your Surge Chips to gain an advantage. However, the great majority of them are for $11 buyins or less with options above this being fairly thin and absent altogether at $55 and higher. Notably, the $125 Sunday Myriad does not accept Surge Chips.

Most tournaments let you add on an extra 10% of the starting stack via the use of Surge Chips though there are a few for which the corresponding figure is 5% or 20%. Look out for tourneys with the text “Surge Chip Special” in the name because they let you exchange your Surge Chips for up to 50% of the starting stack!

Our Analysis

We decided to figure out how much these newfangled Surge Chips are worth in a variety of situations. Although ICM considerations do apply somewhat, we feel that a few commonsense factors outweigh the subtle variations in equity presented by different stack sizes at the beginning of tournaments.

Firstly, getting extra chips in bigger-buyin events is worth more than in smaller tourneys. Secondly, those tournaments that reward you with an extra 20% in your starting stack are more worthwhile investments than those that give you less of an edge. Finally, tournaments with lower starting chip stacks are better because you can redeem fewer Surge Chips to obtain the same starting advantage.

The tournament we have identified that scores the best across this matrix of parameters is the $25 + $1 Myriad satellite, which pays out $125 tickets. Each player begins with 5,000 chips, but you can use Surge Chips to get 1,000 more: a 20% increase.

Assuming 15 entries (all besides you with just the standard stack) and three tickets awarded, ICM simulations suggest that your 1,000 extra chips give you added equity of $4.48 over your chip-deprived opponents ($29.18 vs $24.70). Even in the case that half your opponents have also added 1,000 Surge Chips, all of you deep-stacked competitors still maintain an edge of $4.17 over the others though your individual equity drops to $26.95.

If, however, your priorities are different and you value your time highly, you might want to use up your Surge Chips as quickly as possible without sacrificing too much EV. In this scenario, we advise you to check out the $15 + $1.50 Surge Chips Special PKO - $500 GTD. Here, you start with 10,000 chips but can use up to 5,000 Surge Chips for a whopping 50% more starting chips.

Let us assume 35 entrants and a prize pool of $525 with the top 6 finishers paid. Here, your initial stack is worth $21.94 if you're the only one using Surge Chips, compared to $14.79 for the rest of the field. If half of your adversaries are also redeeming Surge Chips, then all of you have EV of about $17.83 versus the abysmal $12 of your non-surging compeers.

In truth, none of these calculations incorporates the fact that it's much easier to collect bounties when you start with a larger stack, so your real EV is a bit higher. Remember, though, that you're using up 5,000 of your Surge Chips to achieve this EV, so your value per chip is much lower than in the $26 Myriad satellite tourney.

So Is It Worth It?

With the numbers we've shown above, it's clear that using your Surge Chips in the appropriate tournaments lets you increase your EV such that your tournament fee (and then some) is basically being paid for with these chips. It's like getting 100%+ rakeback. Given that the tasks required to accrue Surge Chips are simple and easily achieved, we advise that every player should take advantage of Surge Chips.

Sign up for Everygame to Play With Surge Chips

There's nowhere else on the internet to play with Surge Chips besides Everygame and its partner site Juicy Stakes. Of the two of them, we recommend Everygame because it has a sportsbook and several casino products that are missing from Juicy Stakes.

When you create an account and make a deposit at Everygame, you can look forward to a 200% up to $1,000 poker bonus. Press the button below to get started:

For more information about the site, check out this Everygame Poker review. If you're interested in a partner of Everygame that also has Surge Chips, then read up on Juicy Stakes.

July 27, 2025 – by Max Golden, Editor-in-Chief