PokerTableRatings PartyPoker Challenge Winners Announced

For those of you who were lucky enough to participate in the PokerTableRatings promotion at PartyPoker, you probably came away with a few decent prizes.  For some, it yielded a pretty sick bounty of goodies in a unique online promotion.

Many have said that this was one of the best cash game promotions ever conducted in the history of online poker. It did not leave the prizes up to chance and didn’t only reward grinders who play 17 hours per day for a month straight.  Instead, players had to complete obstacles in order to achieve special badges.  The more badges they accrued, the more they won.

The jackpot went to the first five people to earn all 12 badges.  These players received an iPad or custom set of Paulson poker chips.  The iPad has a retail value of $629 and the chipset is valued at $625. These players’ screen names were “alexsuplucky,” “gym_tan_laun,” “madf15h,” “grandesmokio,” and “lolmaha.”

The next tier of winners were the first ten people to earn eight or more badges, all of whom received a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox gaming system with Kinect.  These winners included “bouboucocco,” “hahahal0ser,” “space311,” “madf15h,” “cryst4l__r3d,” “wan_tan_zang,” “takeflip,” “scvready,” “zhang3feng,” and “soulofdaprty.”

The final tier consisted of the first 50 people to earn four or more badges.  Each of these players received a $10 Amazon gift card.

No matter what tier they achieved, everyone also won a PokerTableRatings Premium subscription and entry to an exclusive freeroll.  The “Ballers,” or those in the top tier, will compete for a WPT Vienna prize package valued at $6,000, while second through fifth places will receive a free PartyPoker Monthly Million ticket worth $640.

The “Pro” players will have a freeroll with first through fifth places getting a Monthly Million Ticket and sixth through tenth places getting a $30,000 Guaranteed ticket worth $162.  The remaining group of people will have a freeroll with a prize pool of $500.

This promotion was unique because of the badges that players could achieve, which rewarded daring play, smarts, and grinding it out consistently every day.  The badges that players could earn were:

Fanatic: Play 1,000 hands in a day (easy)
Slowplay A-A: Limp in with pocket aces, get to showdown, and win (easy)
Maniac: Go all-in pre-flop with 6-6 or worse pocket pair (easy)
Hero Fold: Fold when you have less than 10 big blinds remaining in your stack (medium)
Hero Call: Win at showdown with king-high or worse (medium)
Dead Man’s Hand: Win a pot with two pair, aces and eights (medium)
Grinder: Play 300 hands per day for five days in a row (medium)
The Tilter: Win a hand with 7-2 offsuit when not in the big blind (medium)
Family Pot: Win a family pot where five or more people see the flop (hard)
King of the Hill: Get a 500-big blind stack or more (hard)
Super Straight: Seven-card straight using both hole cards (hard)
Huge Pot: Win a pot that is 25+ big bets for Limit or 400+ big blinds for No Limit (hard)

The requirements were that players had to play real money games at a minimum of $0.05-$0.10 stakes for No Limit Hold’em or $0.25-$0.50 for Limit Hold’em.

The promotion was a surefire success for Poker Table Ratings, which reports on cash games from around the online poker world.