WPN Announces Freebuy Super Series!

  Winning Poker Network has unveiled its most aggressive promotion to date, and every player who has an account is going to be able to take advantage of this, yes even players who only have played free tournaments up to this point, conversely medium to small stakes players are also going to benefit.  It’s aggressive, it’s rich and Winning Poker Network is hoping it will be a huge success!

Winning Poker Network Offers Freebuy Series

Three of the largest sites on Winning Poker Network, America’s Cardroom, Black Chip Poker, YaPoker, and True Poker are teaming up to offer a huge series that will guarantee $150,000 to players from May 8th-May 17th.  While this amount might seem a bit small, it becomes infinitely larger once you realize that players don’t need to pay any money to enter these tournaments.  The Freebuy Super Series is going to allow Winning Poker Network to separate itself from the competition in the US, whether it will work out best for players or the site though is still yet to be realized. 

Freebuys Explained and Rationale

It’s not often that you see a new type of tournament get offered to players, especially with how inventive and forward thinking PokerStars tends to be.  Winning Poker Network though has managed to provide something unique and different for their players in the form of freebuys.  Essentially everyone is able to get into the tournament for free, much like a freeroll, but if you bust you are then able to rebuy into the tournament.  After two hours of late registration the tournament field is finalized and then another hour later there is an option add-on for players to take advantage of (3 hours after the start of the tournament and 1 hour after closing of late registration.)  This is pretty unique, because players are used to having add-on directly after late registration has closed.

This is the first series, which will be looked at further, but it isn’t the first time these tournaments have been run.  Winning Poker Network has ran a few of these in the past, but they haven’t exactly gone super well.  There has been pretty large overlays (over 50% on $20,000 guarantees) that might make this seem like a doomed experiment, however, the rationale for this series isn’t to make a lot of money of the series directly.  As the Winning Poker Network representative said in the announcement for this series that they are aiming for massive social media sharing with this series.  They are hoping that players will talk enough about this to catch the interest of friends and thus drive more traffic to the site.  If that goal is successful or not will only be able to be truly looked at weeks and months after the series has ended, but it’s an exceptionally aggressive attitude to take.

Freebuy Series Overview

In hopes of limiting the overall overlays experienced by the series Winning Poker Network has decided to offer smaller tournaments, but much more of them with many different buy-in levels.  The series guarantees over $150,000 to players and happens over the course of 57 different events.  The series features 3 different games and has a pretty significant amount of different buy-in levels.  The important thing to note though is that no event is over $20 for rebuys + add-on and most are much lower than that.  The Main Event is a $20 rebuy plus add-on with $20,000 guaranteed on Sunday May 17th.

Each day features at least 1 event with a $1 or lower rebuy event, and many days feature tournaments at $0.10 or $0.50 for rebuys and add-on!  Even the smallest events have $500 guarantees with many being at least $1,000, so even if you bust the free entry and want to rebuy, it’s not going to be impossible to have a huge payday.  You can be sure that these events will see a lot of action as well, because Winning Poker Network are also offering up a leaderboard with a top prize of a Punta Cana prize package, much like the one that Juicy Stakes is going to be running satellites for over the next few months.

Summary

Winning Poker Network is taking a huge risk with this series, but they are seeing it as more than just a direct money making venture.  They are hoping to take advantage of the recent stumbles by Carbon Poker and cement themselves as the second largest site for US-based players.  The likely buzz that this kind of series will cause will potentially make it a success, or so the theory goes.  Players of all bankroll levels should pay pretty close attention to this though, because if there are large overlays, that is a lot of value to be scooped up, especially by players unafraid to fire more than 1 free bullet in each event.  What do you think of the series?  Do you think it will be a success?  Is Winning Poker Network overextending themselves?  Tell us on Twitter and Facebook!