PokerStars throw the grinders a bone after announcing plans to create a new rake free league to determine the greatest cash game players in the world with $100,000 in leaderboard prizes up for grabs.
Who is the best poker player in the world?
Ask one of those recreational players online poker rooms covet and it’s Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, or Phil Ivey. Ask a grinder, and I guarantee the answer sits in the highest stakes cash games.
Any idiot can win a tournament or two. But to win playing cash games over the long run is a different bottle of fish sauce. The deep stacked cash games are where the real masters of the universe hang out, and PokerStars has an eye on them.
Christened All Stars PokerStars is planning to host an innovative new cash game series to weed out the very best players on the site. The action takes place over a period of a month, and there are two categories.
Masters Level
The Masters Level is for people playing NL100 – NL400. It is by invite only and emails will start arriving in the mailboxes of players who have accumulated $10,000 in winnings over the past 12-months.
All Stars Level
Ditto, except the game range is NL500+ and players must have won at least $25,000 in the past 12-months.
PokerStars are referring to the first experiment as Season 1, and Severin Rasset explained in a blog post that should the feedback be positive they may host a Season 2, as well as consider moving into different games. The PLO gang will be happy to hear about that.
The games will be rake-free, and there will be a leaderboard with $100,000 in prizes up for grabs. The move is an interesting one given PokerStars post-Amaya attitude of catering more to the recreational players. All of the most recent innovations have been designed to reduce the level of skill and increase the element of luck. The All Star action is definitely for the purists, and a hark back to the good old days of Rail Heaven.
PokerStars will ask the players to share hand histories so fans can get a load of the action. It will be good also to see a dedicated Twitch stream featuring some of the most exciting matches once the leaderboard starts to take shape.
And just when you were beginning to think PokerStars didn’t care.
