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New Beginnings: PokerStars Brings Fun and Festival to Atlantic City
- Updated: October 30, 2016
Driving to Atlantic City across the expressway from Philadelphia, a magnificent skyline filled with casinos and hotels suddenly reveals itself as you approach. You’re reaching the East Coast, the Atlantic Ocean and the edge of North America, but the coastline of “America’s Playground” definitely feels more like a beginning than an end.
Here on the Northern end of the famed Atlantic City Boardwalk at Resorts Casino Hotel, the first ever legal casino opened up in Atlantic City in 1978, that’s actually true. Today marks the beginning of the first ever PokerStars Festival, PokerStars’ live event team’s return to American soil for the first time in almost six years, and by all accounts, something special for poker in Atlantic City and beyond.
The festivities actually began Saturday night with a cocktail reception and a $5,500 freeroll played online on the property here at Resorts on Saturday night, where five $1,100 seats were awarded to the PokerStars Festival New Jersey Main Event. However, the full tournament schedule began Sunday morning with the first of three flights for the $340 PokerStars Cup.
The first big buy in event on the calendar also began at noon with the two-day $2,200 Six-Max No-Limit Hold’em event kicking off.
The entry numbers were a little light for the start of the first two events on the schedule, but it truly marked the beginning of a sense of momentum event organizers are expecting to build throughout the week, and in fact, PokerStars really plans to measure the success of these Festival events more in how much fun the players have here, rather than how many of them actually turn up at the outset.
“Overwhelmingly we just want people to have a bit of fun,” said PokerStars Department Head of Live Poker Operations Neil Johnson. “You hear people say all the time that the fun is missing from poker a little bit, and that’s what we want to change. When people have fun over in Europe it’s when they’re …
