The tournament is on!

The second Poker Grump readers' tournament is now set. It will be held on PokerStars, Monday, April 27, at 21:15 EDT. It will be HORSE (limit), with structure and prizes as shown above. Password is "grumpy" (case-sensitive).

I realize that the game, the buy-in, the date, the time, the site, and every other variable will not be to the liking of all--but then, no possible combination could be.

After the first readers' tournament last year, I promised that I would give back my modest ($10) prize money, as part of my effort to persuade everybody that I'm doing this just for fun and to say "thanks for reading," rather than because I'm trying to take your money. There's no way to program this in to the tournament structure, but in order to make good on that promise, I'll transfer a bonus $10 to whoever knocks me out, once the tournament is done. I'll also promise now to do the same with any prize money I might collect this time around--it goes toward the next readers' tourney. On the outside chance that I win the thing, I'll roll over both the $10 from last time and the prize money from this time. If it's more than a few bucks, it may not all be a bounty, but it will get redistributed in some manner. (Guess you'll just have to trust me on that.)

Stars makes it easy to fund an account, if you don't already have money there. The "Instant e-check deposit" option can take the funds directly from your checking account, no muss, no fuss. If for whatever reason you can't get money onto the site in any other reasonable way, and you'd like to play, I will do exchanges as needed. Email me (see the profile in the left column for the address). We can do an equivalent trade (i.e., $11) on Full Tilt or via PayPal. You will, I hope, understand that in order to prevent being scammed by making an open offer like this, I'll ask you to make your end of the exchange first.

I'll make the next one NLHE again.

Incidentally, I like how Stars makes it easy to set up private tournaments. I hadn't tried it before. You email them, they review your history on the site. If they judge that you've played enough (I have no idea what the exact criteria might be, but I think they just want to be sure that you didn't sign up exclusively for setting up a private tourney), they enable a new feature on your client software. Under "requests" in the main lobby, there then appears the menu for creating a private tournament. It doesn't give some of the options available on Full Tilt, such as deep stacks or bounties, but, on the other hand, you can do it all yourself, rather than exchanging emails with somebody in customer service to do it for you.