Americas Cardroom (ACR) has had a lot of success with its popular Venom multi-table tournament (MTT). With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to be a problem throughout the world, ACR has continued to promote its online poker offerings and has had a great response, especially with its Venom MTTs.
Venom V Offers $10 Million GTD
ACR decided to take a big chance when it announced that its Venom V tournament will carry a $10 million guarantee. This was the biggest guaranteed Venom prize pool that ACR has carried but CEO Phil Nagy was pretty confident that ACR would be able to generate those numbers.
He had good reason to think so as each Venom tournament ended up bigger and better than the previous version. Venom IV had an $8 million guaranteed prize pool and ended up getting a total of 3,774 player registrations which pushed the prized pool past the $8 million mark. Venom IV generated a total of $9.4 million in prize money and this was one of the reasons why Nagy was confident Venom V would surpass $10 million in guaranteed prize money.
Venom V had four starting days and to reach the $10 million guaranteed prize pool, there needed to be an average of 1k player registrations per day. Things did not look good for ACR as Venom V got off to a rather rough start with only 535 players signing up and paying the $2,500 (+$150) buy-in on the first day. Venom V was far behind its prize pool on the first day but things got better as the tournament progressed.
Day 1b was a lot better as player registrations crossed the 1,000 mark as a total of 1,026 players registered. Day 1b not only met the average buy-in numbers but also made up a tad for the poor showing on Day 1. Things did not go as per plan on Day 1C which saw 771 player registrations and once again put ACR on the line for a big overlay.
Nagy did not panic as Venom V drew a big response on the final day when a total of 1,598 players registered. This big spike in player registrations on the final day brought the total number of player registrations to 3,930 registrations which mean that ACR was only short by 70 registrations and $175,000.
While the $175,000 overlay is still a big amount, ACR will be overall happy with the response to Venom V as it did better than Venom IV in terms of player registrations and total prize money.
Venom Tournaments Could Get Bigger
Venom IV took place in Jan 2021 and a player with the handle TRT-Vitor ended up winning the first prize and took home a check for $1.3 million. A total of 576 players will finish in the money during Venom V and the top two players will go home with a check in excess of $1 million each. The final table for Venom V is expected to play out on August 04.
ACR will be happy with the overall promotion of Venom V and will look at it as a very successful event even with the $175,000 overlay. What will be interesting is to see if ACR will schedule another Venom tournament before the end of 2021 or wait till 2022 for the next one.
Nagy could play it safe and lower the guaranteed prize pool to $8 million for the next edition or he might take another risk and push for another $10 million guaranteed prize pool for Venom VI. ACR is working to build its reputation as being one of top online poker sites in the market when it comes to MTTs.
To find out more information about Venom and future tournaments, go to Americas Cardroom.