partypoker Launches Restructured KO Series With Reduced Rake

partypoker recently announced the launch of another Knockout (KO) Series that will take place in June. The KO series will have a lot more events to choose from and a newly introduced reduced rake structure. Following the disastrous crash of the last KO Series, partypoker is hoping to come back with better structured events and servers.

The inaugural KO Series held took place from February 25 to March 4, where $10 million in guarantee was given out across 164 low and high buy-in events. Apart from the regular buy-ins that ranged from as low as $1.10 to as high as $5,200, there were seven Championship events a total of $3.67 million in guarantees. Two of the events came with a $1 million GTD.

Some could say the event was a success, but a server crash plagued the last day of the KO Series, making many players disappointed and outraged.

During the finale of the last KO Series, partypoker severs crashed, sending players into a flurry of connection issues at the end of the festival. The on-going tournaments were paused, and all MTTs scheduled on March 4 were cancelled.

All rebates were issued in the 48 hours that followed the outage, and $2 million was added to various prize pools in the remaining events.

New KO Series – Events

This time around, the KO Series will see as many as 226 events across Micro, Low, Medium, High and High Roller events. Buy-ins start from as low as $0.55 to a manageable $1,050 to accommodate players from all bankrolls.

While there are more side events to play in, this upcoming KO Series will only offer four Championship events, with a total of $2 million in guarantees, each at $500,000. The four championship events are two sets of a $530 High Roller 6-Max and $1,050 High Roller Smooth, scheduled on June 3 and June 10.

The new KO Series will follow the newly introduced buy-in structure launched during the POWERFEST series earlier this month, where there is no rake in the bounty portion of all Progressive Knockout (PKO) events. The new format is gaining popularity among partypoker regulars and partypoker is considering rolling it into permanent effect across all PKO MTT structures.

In a statement, Patrick Leonard, partypoker ambassador, said

When we initially offered PKO tournaments I was generally against the format. I thought it took the ‘pureness’ out of tournament poker, but because of the insane popularity, I was forced to play because the prize pools were so big. To my pleasant surprise I loved them; people played way looser and there was a lot of action