Last December, PokerStars announced the Poker Players NL Hold’em Championship (PSPC) that was scheduled to be the kickoff event for the 2019 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) in January 2019. The announcement was shortly followed by the distribution of a dozen passes each valued at $30,000 which was also then followed by a massive survey in August 2018. The survey was primarily meant to get some input from poker players from all around the globe on various technicalities of the event and the input they gave included such things as blind level duration, table occupancy as well as starting stack among many others.
With about 100 days left till the tournament kicks off, PokerStars has moved to officially announce the details of for the inaugural PSPC – the announcement also included the scheduled for the PCA 2019.
The PCA 2019 Schedule
Scheduled to kick off on January 5, 2019, the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure will be held at the Atlantis Resort & Casino on Paradise Island and will run till January 16. Other than the Poker Players NL Hold’em Championship, there will be a series of big and smaller buy-in events running between January 6-10. This will bring the total number of events running within the 12-day span to 41 with some of the major highlights being:
- $5,300 Turbo (January 7-8)
- $50,000 Single-Day High Roller Event (January 9)
- $1,100 PCA National (January 10-11)
- $100,000 Super High Roller (January 10-12)
- $100,000 Single-Day (January 12)
- $25,000 High Roller (January 14-16)
- $10,000 Main Event (January 11-16)
The PSPC’s Details
One of the most notable decisions for the PSPC is that the tournament will start out 9-handed on Day 1, before moving to an 8-handed set-up from the second day onwards. The illustrious event will begin with players that either bought into it or qualified for it starting with 60,000 in chips and with the one-hour levels as well as the first blinds starting at 100 and 200, the starting stack will be worth 300 big blinds.
The first two days will play for eight levels with no dinner break i.e., there will be only twenty-minute breaks after the second and fourth levels of the day followed by a half-hour break after the sixth level. Therefore, the action will be concluding at around 9:00 p.m. for both Day 1 and Day 2. As for Day 3, the plan will be to play down to 16 or 24 players while on Day 4 the tournament is expected to come to an end when 6 or 8 players remain after which these remaining players will return on Day 5 to play down to a winner.
Also, worth noting is that the Big Blind Ante will be in play right from the start and once the money is reached, a 30-second shot clock and 30-second time banks will be brought in with every player being issued a one-time card for every level. Unfortunately, unused time cards will not be carried over to the following day.
