PokerStars NJ just recently finished up the New Jersey Spring Championship of Online Poker, also known as the NJSCOOP. The series offered a ton of tournament action, spread across High and Low events. The series offered up $1.2 million in guaranteed prize money and ended up reaching almost $1.8 million in prizes awarded. In total, 33,737 entries were seen and only six events had an overlay.
Large Prize Pools
Many of the scheduled events of the NJSCOOP saw the guaranteed prize pool increase. Some events even had an increase of 50% or more. Event #1 on the High End offered $20,000 in prize money originally. After the event ended, just over $47,400 was awarded. Event #17 was also a big hit on the High end, with $12,000 initially offered and then going up to$33,415,20.
The Main Events were also a big success with the High and Low versions both pulling a crowd. The High version had a buy-in of $300 and offered $100,000 in prize money. With 620 entries, the prize pool jumped considerably to $173,600.
For the Low end, the event had a much smaller $50 buy-in and offered $30,000 in prize money. This event had 1,252 entries which pushed the prize pool to $56,966.
High Traffic Volume
In New Jersey, PokerStars is continuing to see high traffic volume, during the SCOOP and in regular gameplay. The series was such a success due to players being at home instead of out and about. Like most states in the US, New Jersey is under a stay at home order. Players are staying in to try and avoid catching or potentially spreading the coronavirus.
For the NJSCOOP, players continued to log on each day while in quarantine to play in the High and Low online poker tournaments. The NJ version of the tournament series finished similarly to the one that took place in Pennsylvania. The market is a bit bigger in PA, so they offered up a guaranteed $2 million in prize money which jumped to around $3.2 million once the series was finished up.
The success of the NJSCOOP and the PA version show just how popular online poker is. Over the coming weeks, PokerStars should continue to see an influx of player traffic as the self-isolation process continues.
Once everything gets back to normal, it will be interesting to see if the poker traffic dwindles back out or if this is the resurgence that poker needed to get back in the game. For years, New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada were the only states to offer online poker and they had a hard time seeing heavy traffic among their members.
Now it seems online poker is coming in handy as players are stuck at home with nothing fun to do. We will continue to track the popularity of the industry and how it is affected as the coronavirus continues to be an issue as well as once things get back to normal.
