The media cycle for the Venom is kicking off for real this week. A press release dropped yesterday morning by Americas Cardroom suggests that they are getting themselves geared up to bring in the enormous number of players required to avoid offering a tasty overlay.
The event, with a $10 million guarantee, is extremely ambitious. It is the biggest guarantee in the site's history.
The buy-in for the event is $2,650. This means that ACR needs 3,774 entries to break even on the guarantee.
The number is actually much higher than this because of the extensive range of freerolls the site is offering. ACR's Venom Fever freerolls have "886 seats up for grabs" at $0 a pop. Those seats, plus the paying customers who need to match their buy-ins to cover costs, put the break-even point at 5,546. And the ACR team seem pretty confident they can hit that.
"This isn't just a big deal. It's absolutely massive," Michael Harris, spokesperson for ACR, said in the presser. "The $10 Million Venom is our biggest tournament ever. And judging by how successful the last Venom tournaments were, expect to see our latest one to destroy the record books."
The event kicks off with Day 1A on Friday, July 23, with the following Day 1s coming on the following Sunday, and the Friday and Sunday of the weekend after. Day 2 starts on August 2, and the rest of the tourney will play out over the following days.
$10 million guarantee
ACR's ambition begins to look Icarian when you note that it falls in the same window as the WSOP Online. Those bracelets are hard to compete with.
However, ACR has a few reasons to be optimistic about the event.
The market is looking good at the moment. The Wynn Millions just managed to beat its guarantee in a live $10k. Their $5 million guaranteed Venom went over well. Plus $10 mil in the pot means there will be at least two millionaires made at the final table. Despite what The Social Network tried to tell us, one million dollars is still pretty cool.
The $10 million guarantee is a big enough headline that it may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And if it fails, that's good publicity too. Everyone loves an overlay.
ACR tweeted about the event today with a GIF of a spider and the caption: "Crawl on over to the tons of qualifiers and earn your $2,650 seat into our biggest tourney ever."
Everyone loves wordplay too.
Full schedule
Day | Date | Time |
Day 1A | Friday, July 23, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 1B | Sunday, July 25, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 1C | Friday, July 30, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 1D | Sunday, August 1, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 2 (~11 hours of play) | Monday, August 2, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 3 (plays down to final table) | Tuesday, August 3, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Day 4 (plays down to winner) | Wednesday, August 4, 2021 | 13:00 ET |
Featured image source: Twitter