Online poker sites have always employed special tournament series and they are a significant part of the fabric that binds the poker community together. They create aspirations and dreams amongst pros and recreational players alike. Success in them has kick-started the careers of many well known players.

While they have always been an important part of an online poker site’s offering, they have become more and more prevalent over the years. Most sites used to  typically run special online poker series about four times a year, perhaps a a little more. Now it seems like they run them almost non-stop, with smaller series filling in the time in between the major ones. 

An online poker series can last anything from a few days to several weeks, during which time they schedule a special series of tournaments, a various different buy-in levels, with larger guarantees than their regular offering. Often these series will have an accompanying leaderboard and additional prizes added by the site, rewarding the best performing players of the online festival.

Natural8 is Asia’s biggest poker room and shares the same network as GG Poker. As such, all of the tournament series on GG Poker also run on Natural8 Poker. There are some series that are timed specifically for Asian players and these include:

WPT Global is not owned by the same company that owns the WPT itself, but they do share the brand name and from a player perspective, it is the online arm of the World Poker Tour, providing official satellites and hosting online WPT events within its online tournament series. This is particularly significant as the winner of WPT events online at WPT Global also becomes a member of the WPT Champions Club.  It’s a pretty big deal and a huge accolade to join the WPT Champions Club. Not only do you get invites to special WPT Champions tournaments and pre-main event dinners; it also earns you a special place in the history of this prestigious tour by having your name engraved on the Mike Sexton Cup.  

WPT Online Championship events take place during the main tournament series of the year at WPT Global, which follow and are named after the seasons of the year. It’s very a straightforward and easily understandable naming convention, which does what it says on the tin. The names of these key  festivals, which each have seven figure prize pool guarantees, are:

These festival often include a $3,500 buy-in Online WPT Championship. Additionally, WPT Global holds shorter festivals in between these main ones. Recent examples of these include:

Until a few years ago the main online poker tournament series on iPoker was called iPops. However in the last few years the network has changed its special series offering. During this time the network has grown, resulting in increased liquidity, enabling it to offer bigger online series than ever before, with bigger guarantees. The main tournament series brand on iPoker is now called the Elite Series, which takes place in summer, but also stages Winter, Spring and Mid-Stakes editions. The network also runs regular Bounty Hunter Series. 

Network tournament series on iPoker are typically staged at three different buy-in levels, high, medium and low, with each tournament on the schedule running at each level. The Elite Series Winter Edition had $7m in prize pool guarantees and the 2024 Spring Edition, which runs from May 1st for five weeks, with over 500 tournaments on the schedule. 

The iPoker Network is shared by many online poker sites, including Grosvenor Poker and Bet365 Poker.

Tournament series at America’s Cardroom are well established, most utilising the suffix OSS, which stands for the Online Super Series. The main online festival of the year at ACR is the OSS, but it also has several siblings, such as the MOSS (Mini Online Super Series) and the PKOSS (Progressive Knockout Online Super Series). It’s an identifier for the site, not unlike PokerStars’ COOPs. 

However the OSSs are not the only tournament series that ACR runs and some are more serious than others. At the top of the tree is the Venom, a high stakes PKO tournament that comes with an entrance price of $2,650 with a lofty $12.5m guarantee. On the lighter side of things, the High Five Series is a springtime online poker festival, which is so laid back it takes an extended break at 4.20pm each day, man.

Although PokerStars is no longer the world's biggest online poker site, it held that position for a long time and was the most significant pioneer of major online tournament series during the original poker boom of 20 years ago. The World Championship of Online Poker, better known as the WCOOP set the standard for serious online poker tournaments and spawned a long list of other online festivals that used the suffix COOP. 

The WCOOP and the SCOOP (Spring Championship of Online Poker) are still the two biggest online festivals that run on PokerStars and titles at these series are highly prestigious and much sought after. Apart from these stalwart tournament series, PokerStars runs several other online poker festivals throughout the year. These include:

Unibet Poker is a great place for recreational players. Their software, provided by Relax Gaming does not work with poker tracking software, as players can change their screen-name as often as they like. The site hosts daily and Sunday specials and also spreads several poker tournament series throughout the year including the flagship Unibet Online Series (UOS). Recent examples of Unibet Poker tournament series include