Deep Stack Tournaments - Thumbs Up

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In most every poker tournament we’ve ever played, the structure of the tournament turns it into an all-in festival after only a couple hours - if you’re lucky. Most of the daily tournaments thrown by the Vegas card rooms, for instance, get to push-monkey stages within 90 minutes, as they want you to bust out and spend your poker money in the raked games. That’s why it’s nice to see an online site who gets it.

PokerStars has been offering what they call “Deep Stacks” tournaments a few times a day, and we’re in love. We played our first Deep Stacks tourney on Saturday night (No Limit Hold ‘Em, $30+$3 buy-in), and had what was easily our most enjoyable tournament experience ever. The tournament starts with 5/10 blinds, but you get 5,000 in chips and blinds change every 30 minutes (instead of 1,500 in chips with 10 minute blind increases). Unless you’re recklessly throwing your chips around like a maniac, you can afford to play patient poker for the first few hours. Compare this with any other multi-table tournament, where if you don’t quadruple up in the first two hours, you’ve effectively entered “panic mode.” We finished 76th out of 766 (13 out of the money), but got six and a half hours of play for our $33. If you’re interested in playing poker as opposed to pushing all-in and have eight to ten hours to kill, we can’t recommend the Deep Stacks at Stars highly enough.

Deep Stack Schedule [PokerStars]