The Cake Poker network have become something of a standing joke in the poker forums after they started their laughable Tuesday Two Hundred. Now, we all agree that Tuesday is a shit day, so credit to Cake for trying to make it more interesting. But just because Tuesdays suck doesn’t mean people lose their powers of critical thought.
Guaranteed tournaments are a great marketing tool for online poker sites. You have high buy-in tournaments like the PartyPoker Million ($1m guaranteed), the PokerStars Sunday 500 ($500k guaranteed) and the Bodog Poker Open ($200k guaranteed), trophies all poker players dream of bagging.
Then there are also low buy-in tournaments with low guarantees in the $1K-$5K range. Traditionally, if you have a $10 tournament with a $1K guarantee, you know that there will be around 100 players — hopefully a few less so there is an overlay.
Cake has a tournament they call the Tuesday Two Hundred, which is an odd mix of the two categories. It is a high buy-in tournament with a low guarantee. The buy-in is $215 and it is a $1K guarantee.
This is taking the negatives of both types of tourney, putting them in a bowl and baking up a really unappealing Cake. Your Mum may have mentioned that two wrongs don’t make a right and, frankly, she was right. The poker forums have quite understandably adopted an online version of laughing and pointing at the square kid on this one.
However, there is a silver lining. Not all areas of the industry think this type of tourney is bad. D Sanchez, President & CEO of HailMarySports.com, is backing Cake all the way.
“Cake have started something that we should have thought of long ago – heads will role in our poker department for this. But we move fast at HailMarySports and by next Tuesday we’ll have a brand new $1K Guaranteed Payroll with just a $1K buy-in. We’ll go head-to-head with Cake on Tuesday nights. We’re afraid of no one.”
