As I wrote in my previous blog entry, Play Money Poker has changed. One of the big changes in the last two years is the dramatic increase in popularity of tournament poker, with the number of daily tournament entries more than doubling in the last two years.

And what do these players want? They want bigger and better events. Up to now we have generally built our tournament events as 'light' versions of their real-money counterparts. However this will change in April this year with The Elite Series, the first poker tournament series designed with the play money player in mind.

There are a number of really exciting innovations:

Hourly Hyper Saturday
On Saturday 16th April we will see the first "Hourly Hyper" day. This is a day set aside for our most hardy tournament players, with fifteen identical hyper turbo hold'em events starting one hour apart. To make getting up early and / or staying up late worthwhile, we are adding ten million chips to each individual event, and over five hundred million chips to the players who crush hardest that day and top the Hourly Hyper Saturday leaderboard.

Themed Event Days
Do you like Omaha? Then you'll want to put 'Omaha Wednesday' and 'Round-of-Each Monday' in your diary, and start building your bankroll for the Omaha Super High-Roller.

Want to get your feet wet with a different variant of poker? You'll enjoy the Badugi, Triple-Draw, and Stud Hi/Lo events on 'Try-A-New-Game-Friday'.

And for our PokerStars women, we have a day of events just for you with some challenging hold'em events just for you on 'Women's Tuesday'.

Billionaire Club Invitational
On Sunday 17th April we have something really special arranged. Twelve members of the Billionaire Club will qualify to play in the two-table Billionaire Club Invitational. They will be playing for a top prize of one billion chips, but they won't just have their fellow club members to contend with; they will be joined by four of our most acclaimed Team PokerStars players, Barry "barryg1" Greenstein, Chris "money800" Moneymaker, Felix "xflixx" Schneiders, and Andre "acoimbra" Coimbra.

This will undoubtedly be the most prestigious and toughest two tables of play money poker in history.

You can visit our website for more information on The Elite Series, and keep an eye out in the lobby in late March for details of the events. If you want to join our Billionaire Club, please see the Billionaire Club page for more information.