Online Poker Highlights for first weekend in April, 2024

GG Poker’s Road to Vegas promotion is one of the highlights of the weekend and will be for most of the next three months, with the WSOP Main Event scheduled to start on July 3rd. Last year GG Poker qualified 774 players for the most sought after title in poker and this year they are aiming to bring over 1,000 qualifiers to the Horseshoe and Paris casinos that will jointly host the 55th Annual World Series of Poker.

Close to 300 players have already secured their seats in satellites that are heavily overlaying, providing significant value to players, with over $1,000 added in overlay for every seat awarded so far. There have been over $300,000 in missed guarantees so far and satellites are likely to continue over the weekend. These were the biggest overlays over the Easter Weekend:

The key satellite of the week is Main Event Mania, with 20 packages guaranteed on Sunday evening at 7.30pm (UK) with a hefty $1,200 buy-in, however there are feeder satellites from $20 into these.

There are also cheaper direct satellites, for $125, $250 and $525 buy-ins, but these mostly just guarantee one package and with a much higher ratio of entrants to seats awarded, are much more of a long-shot way to win a seat. The $1,200 buy-in mega satellites held throughout the week and Sunday’s Main Event Mania are the ones that offer the best chance of qualifying and are posting the biggest overlays.

GG Million$ Week has been running since last Sunday and the high stakes action continues this weekend. The cheapest event in the series costs a  $525 to enter, while the main event and other high roller tournaments go up to as much as $10,300 to play. Gladly there is also a satellite path to help most regular players fulfil a dream of playing in a high stakes event. 

The $10,000 main event, is a phase tournament, with starting flights running every day, with one on Saturday and Sunday. The last chance starting day is on Monday afternoon, with the tournament resuming for day 2 on Monday evening. There are also several side events per day.

Last Weekend GG Poker relaunched their Battle Royale poker game, including a mystery bounty element. Instead of 30 players in the original Battle Royale, there are now 18 players per tournament. It starts off in a similar way to the original Battle Royale format, with a 5-handed Rush stage that lasts until 9 players remain. 

If a game of Mystery Battle Royale is not down to 9 by the time 10 minutes have elapsed, it becomes all-in until the final table is reached. The other key difference is that during the Rush stage players do not earn bounties for knock-outs.

The biggest mystery bounty available is $100,000 and there is $10,000 awarded through daily leaderboards. There is a leaderboard for each of the four buy-in amounts that Mystery Battle Royale can be played for. The buy-ins are $0.25, $1, $3 and $10.

If you are yet to register, use the GG Poker bonus code wired to get started with a 100% deposit match worth up to $600.

Following on from March’s 100% MTT fees being returned to players via $600,000 of freerolls, in April the site has taken it a step further and simply scrapped registration fees for most multi-table tournaments. The fee will also be added into the prize pool, so tournaments that were previously $20+$2 or $100+$10 now become $22+$0 and $110+$0 to enter. 

While this may dry up quite a few of the overlays that were a constant feature of the site’s tournament offering, there will still definitely be some that miss their guarantees, the Bump It Up events

There are three ‘Bump It Up’ tournaments per day and an additional three on Sundays. In this promotion, in these selected tournaments, if the guarantee is ever met, it is raised by at least 10% for the next edition. All of these have bumped up during March, some of them several times. 

They are now more likely to hit their guarantees with the fees being added to the prizepool, but the nature of the promotion means that they will then increase again for the next edition. They certainly won’t grow by 10% everyday, so there should still be some juicy overlays every day on WPT Global. These are the current guarantees:

Also taking place this weekend is the Sunday Million 18th Anniversary on PokerStars. Every year the once biggest site in the world does a special birthday version of the tournament, with a huge guarantee and this year they have set this at $8m, a $500k increase on 2023’s $7.5m, which only just avoided an overlay by 5%. It starts at 6.05pm (UK) on Sunday 7th April 2024 and is scheduled to be a three-day tournament, which is a rarity in online poker. 

The Sunday Million is usually a $109 Progressive Knock Out tournament these days, but for this special anniversary edition it reverts to its original format as a $215 (non-PKO). This makes it challenging for the site to meet the guarantee, as they no longer have a player base that can organically support a $215 event of this size. They rely heavily on satellites to fill the seats and meet the guarantee and this is where most people will start their Sunday Million journey.

Satellites are running around-the-clock, every few minutes at peak times and there is a wide variety of qualifying options, starting as low as $1 and rising to $55 for the most expensive ones. There are even free-buy (no cost to enter, but a charge to rebuy) satellites as well, so it is technically possible to qualify for the Sunday Million for absolutely nothing.

Most satellites have multiple seats guaranteed into them, some with as many as 500 and some of these are probably going to overlay. Even if they don’t overlay they do present an easier opportunity to qualify, with so many seats guaranteed.

The Bounty Hunter Series ran throughout March on Grosvenor Poker and across the iPoker Network. There isn’t such a long tournament series in April, but there is a series aimed at low staking players taking place 3-15 April, 2024. 

The Micro Madness Series features over 100 mts, with over €1m in guarantees across the series. The main event is a €30 Mystery Bounty and is being run as a flighted tournament, with Day 1s taking place several times a day. Day two is on Sunday 17th March, at the very end of the series. 

The format for this main event is unusual, as it allows players to continue playing day 1s even if they have already bagged stack for day 2. Unlike most tournaments that allow this, it’s not a ‘best stack forward’ situation and players taking more than one stack through to day two will have them combined before the restart of play. 

As the bounties only kick-in at the beginning of day 2, its highly advantageous to try to build as big a stack as possible. Some players are likely to try and get several stacks through to give themselves the best chance of scooping bounties.

Grosvenor Poker is the online poker site to qualify for Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT). Satellites of various buy-ins run throughout the week, which award credit that can be used for the GUKPT, the 25/50 events, the Goliath or any other live event running at Grosvenor casinos. 

Players can accumulate credit from multiple satellites and choose when and where to use it. The GUKPT lands in Edinburgh next week, where Ludovoic Geilich will be looking to not only defend his main event title from last year. Read PokerWired’s recent interview with the mercurial Scottish player.

The tournament on Sunday that is most prone to overlay is the €100 buy-in Fight Club, which starts just five minutes later at 7.05pm (UK. Last week this tournament posted an overlay of nearly €2,000 off of a €12,000 guarantee.