PokerListings Operator Awards: Best Online Series
Inaugurated in 2020 PokerListings awards the best Poker Operators of the year and presents the pack leaders in the industry. This time it's time to take a look at the nominees for the Best Online Tournament Series.
Best Online Tournament Series 2022
Which Online Tournament Series takes the cake for overall event management, structure, promos, entries and prizes?
This PokerListings Operator Award goes to the poker room judged to have given us the best tournament series event this year. Following the iconic Moneymaker win in 2003, I think we can all agree that online tournament series are essential to the community. You can turn a small-entry satellite into a big win, from the comfort of your own home. So this automatically increases player pools and inflates prize pools.
We’ve had lots more online series events than usual this year, for obvious reasons - with some giant guarantees. These nominated events ran over one week, one month or several months. Some had huge Main Event turnouts or guarantees, and featured satellites, side events and promos alongside them.
For the PokerListings Operator Awards: Best Online Series category, we have five nominees this year and these are: The Festival Online (888poker), WSOP Online (GGPoker), partypoker MILLIONS (partypoker), SCOOP (PokerStars), Unibet Online Series (Unibet).
Below, we’ll give a brief highlights description of each of these worthy online poker series. Anyone who enjoys online poker tournaments appreciates that real money online poker operators put in a great deal of planning and effort.
Nominees: Best Online Tournament Series 2022
The Festival Online (888poker)
The Festival Online is an online version of the very popular The Festival Series which is a player-focused live event tour that goes from strength to strength. Attracting over 8,000 players, this summer series - 888poker’s first such collaboration with The Festival – was a great success, paying out over $800,000 in prize money across more than two dozen tournaments.
A variety of games and formats meant that players with different personal favourites were catered for, and buy-ins started as low as $1 so that literally anyone could take part.
Learn more about The Festival Series on TheFestival.com
WSOP Online (GGPoker)
The World Series of Poker is perhaps the event that most non-players might most recognise, so the association with GGPoker that is the WSOP Online is a feather in the cap for the innovative poker room that justifies its claim to take over pole position from veteran rivals.
Not surprisingly, the gigantic scale of this series renders a ‘brief’ detailed description an impossible task, suffice to say that being able to guarantee a $20,000,000 prize pool for the Main Event is testament to the success of this ambitious partnership.
Learn more about GGPoker in our GGPoker Review
partypoker MILLIONS (partypoker)
It’s almost expected that whenever partypoker does anything nowadays the word ‘millions’ is going to be bandied about, and this September poker fest was no exception. However, apart from the $2,000,000 purse for 1st place in the Millions Online Main Event, this is one of those special tournaments – like a tennis Major – that any poker player worth their salt wants to win, and such is the draw of partypoker Millions that it attracts would-be champions from around the globe. Furthermore, it’s with this in mind that partypoker made sure to provide a wide range of qualifiers - in numerous formats – in order to make this series affordable and accessible (it was possible to start the quest at 1c).
Learn more about partypoker in our partypoker Review
SCOOP (PokerStars)
For those of you who don’t know, Pokerstars SCOOP stands for the Spring Championship of Online Poker and, again, this has become one of the major events on the calendar. With a marathon schedule of 107 ‘events’ over 318 tournaments, a key feature here is splitting proceedings into three diostinct categories, namely Low, Medium and High. The idea with such a set-up is to give everyone opportunities to take part in a prestigious series which, incidentally, can justifiably announce a guaranteed overall prize pool of at least $75,000,000.
Learn more about PokerStars in our PokerStars Review
Unibet Online Series (Unibet)
Size isn’t everything, and with their player-friendly Online Series, Unibet have demonstrated admirably that it’s not necessary to pay out nosebleed prize pools to give poker fans what they want. Not that the payouts at Unibet should be sniffed at!
But the ethos here is making sure that recreational players - essentially the beating heart of online poker – are properly looked after, and hosting an impressive 105 events is a good way of delivering, while guaranteeing at least €500,000 in prizes helps!
Learn more about Unibet in our Unibet Review
How the Awards Process Works
The PokerListings editorial team has worked in the online poker business for decades and here we’re presenting the PokerListings Operator Awards - casting a spotlight on the most deserving in the business.
1. Nominations
Throughout the month of November and December, our PokerListings experts present the shortlisted nominees in several different categories: Best for Beginners, Best for Grinders, Best Online Series, Best Overall Software, Innovation of the Year, Poker Operator of the Year, and finally the PokerListings Players' Favorite. You can check all dates on our PokerListings Awards page.
2. Voting
During this Nomination period in December all PokerListings players can vote for our category: Your favorite poker operator of them all. You will find a wider selection of nominees than the other award categories for a better choice. And you can cast your vote (one per person) on our Facebook and Twitter channels. We'll provide results on both outlets as well as our Player Favorite page - along with the other category results.
3. Winners
After a long deliberation throughout this month, we will announce the winners on all our channels at the end of December. Our winners will also be contacted and provided with their badge of honor as this year's winners.
More PokerListings Operator Awards
These are the PokerListings Operator Awards categories:
