Jameson Singer

I want you to sit back in your chair and think about something for me. Now, this may take awhile to find an answer so just be patient. When was the last time you saw a "Guarantee" tournament on a well-known site actually have a prize pool that stayed under the amount of the guarantee?

...Anything yet?

...How about now?

...Yea. Me neither.

The greed of these poker sites screams out loud everytime the letters G-U-A-R-A-N-T-E-E show up on the poker screen. Seriously, take a look at the most recent FTOPS on Full Tilt Poker. Now, don't get me wrong, I love poker and I love online poker especially Full Tilt, but the fact is they know full well these guarantees are a mirage. In the first event of the FTOPS the guaranteed prize pool was $500,000. The total prize pool when play began was at an astounding $833,000. That's $233,000 over the guarantee...in a $200 buy-in tournament! That's 1,165 players over the the guarantee! It's like when Kenny Bania offers Jerry a very nice expensive suit and supposedly wants "nothing for it". Jerry knows this is not the case and eventually Bania asks for dinner. This dinner eventually turns into complications about what constitutes a meal and Bania attempts to get many meals out of the transaction.

That situation is very similar to the guarantee tournament. I see the "big" guarantee for a prize pool but know the poker site is just trying to manipulate me. They are saying, "Look at us. We are trying to do the online players a favor by giving them guaranteed prize pools. How nice are we?".

So for me, I will continue to get pissed everytime I see a poker site promoting a guarantee tournament. And until these sites start making prize pools that are actually bigger than the actual prize pool, I shall call these tournaments "The Kenny Bania Tournaments".