PokerStars to Unroll FRESH tournament with $5M Guaranteed
At the beginning of the year, Spanish and French regulators announced that first Franco-Spanish online poker tables will be launched in the following weeks and now that time has come.
These two countries – Spain and France – are a part of an agreement signed back in July 2017 for a shared liquidity pool between four European countries Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. The agreement was aimed to enable these European Union members to share online poker players for the first time and to improve the state of online poker in all four markets.
France and Spain were the first to sign the Resolution in January 2018 to share liquidity, while Italy and Portugal are still in the process.
Since PokerStars holds licenses from the regulators both in Spain and France, it was only natural for them to be the first operator to join the exciting new project. PokerStars combined its French and Spanish ring-fenced online poker rooms to create a much bigger site with shared liquidity between the countries and opened up registration for players outside of both of the two countries.
To celebrate the shared liquidity pool, PokerStars is to unite poker players from both countries in a brand new poker tournament FRESH (France Espania Hold’em).
The series will take place between 28 January and 11 February. This will be the richest online series these two countries have seen so far, with $5 million guaranteed across 50 scheduled events. Plenty of tournament events are suitable for players with varying bankrolls with buy-ins starting from only $10 or $20.
The series include Main Event $250 buy-in and $1 million guaranteed Main Event Prize Pool. Besides the main prize, the winner of the Main Event will get a Platinum Pass Package to the PSPC (PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em Championship). The second Platinum Pass will be awarded in an all-in shootout involving all players that entered at least one FRESH event. Platinum Pass is valued at $30,000.
This is the first poker room of its kind and PokerStars is, for now, the only site approved by gaming authorities in both countries. PokerStars became the third largest online poker room in the world with this shared tables launch, right after the International PokerStars and IDNPoker. Fourth and fifth place belong to 888poker and PartyPoker.