By now you’ve probably heard about Americas Cardroom’s weekly cash game event called ‘The $1k Cage’. This nosebleed stakes cash game in time based tournament format has taken the online poker world by storm. Each week, players either win a $55 satellite to participate in the $1,000+$50 buy-in cash game or pony up the buy-in to play stakes as high as $25/$50.

Well, now micro stakes players can take their turn in a new miniaturized version of The Cage called The Playpen.

The buy-in for these fun cash games in time based tournament format are just $10.50 and all players start with 1,000 chips with each worth 1 penny.

The Playpen has four blind levels:

• Level 1: 5/10 with $1 antes
• Level 2: 10/20 with $2 antes
• Level 3: 15/30 with $3 antes
• Level 4: 25/50 with $5 antes

DATES AND TIMES:

• Sunday, January 17th at 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm ET
• Wednesday, January 20th at 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm ET
• Sunday, January 24th at 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm ET
• Wednesday, January 27th at 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm ET

The Playpen progresses much faster than The Cage in that the blinds increase every 13 minutes as opposed to every hour. The entire tournament concludes after 60 minutes of play with chips then converted to cash. For example if you have 20,000 chips in front of you, $200 will be credited to your account.

The Playpen is a must-play event! In order to cash in your chips you must survive all four levels of play and there is no quitting early, late registration, or re-entry upon elimination.

LEADER BOARD

ACR is rewarding the player who finishes atop the Playpen Leader Board with an entry to the $1k Cage!

The winner will play the $1k Cage on Wednesday February 3rd at 7:00pm ET.

Micro stakes players can now enjoy the thrill of playing nosebleed stakes without having to invest the serious money - all while potentially winning hundreds of dollars in the process.

For more information about The Playpen, click on the image below

I'm not going to be a participant in these events, but I do think this is one of your better ideas. Good job WPN.

Agreed! I hope my schedule permits me to play all tournies. Well done!

sounds fun, however i will pass unless their is complementary cotton candy thrown in

This is explained very poorly. $10.50 buyin. 1,000 chips. 5/10 w $1 ante. 5/10 obviously refers to tournament chip blind level, but then you say $1 ante. Initially I was like WTF, ten cent blinds with $1 antes. Then it dawned on me that this was just worded very poorly. Remove the $ signs from the antes and it makes actual sense.

That's what I was thinking too. I'm still not clear on how much the player actually puts in the pot every hand.

5 chip small blind, 10 chip big blind, 1 chip ante.

Equivalent to 5 cent small blind, 10 cent big blind, 1 cent ante.

(Each chip is worth 1 cent. Start with 1000 chips = $10.)

Scale up accordingly for future levels.


The leaderboard reward is generous ($1k entry), but extremely high variance. I'd think a $250/$150/$100/$75/$50, then $25 for 10 more places structure would make players far happier, despite being less total money - and substantially increase the number of players that register (that's the goal, isn't it?). You're forcing players to play a tourney 100x the stakes of what they were just playing. It's the same problem with the beast/SnC "freerolls" into the cage, half the players are going to stall as much as possible.

Makes the Cage tourney pretty much unplayable, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the only people who play are the ones who satellite in/would rather have the $1k than play, so the stalling cycle continues.

With that said, it's still an interesting experiment for a tourney type, might fair better at low stakes than high stakes. 1 hour seems slightly short though considering rake paid, maybe 2 hours would be the happy middle ground? Tough to say.

I love this. Great idea.

Considering that a 10nl player would probably be paying about $.50 in rake anyway if he played for an hour, the leaderboard probably makes this a +EV endeavor.

I think that promos are what make a site look like fun to new players. It's nice to see a promo aimed at potential entry level depositing players.

Hi, sorry about that.

Indeed all is expressed in the actual tournament chips:

Level 1: 5/10 with 1 antes
Level 2: 10/20 with 2 antes
Level 3: 15/30 with 3 antes
Level 4: 25/50 with 5 antes

all tournament chips.

Now, as each $1 tournament chip equals 1 penny real money, these will be the numbers in actual cash:

$0.05 / $0.10 - $0.01
$0.10 / $0.20 - $0.02
$0.15/ $0.30 - $0.03
$0.25 / $0.50 - $0.05

I like it. I will even play some, they look like fun (and the 1 hour time limit is a good sell for me too).

There are big promos geared towards higher volume, higher stakes players.... having some special promos like this geared towards micro/small stakes or entry level players I think is a good thing and wise business decision. If this is a success (I'll be surprised if it's not) I hope we see more like it in the future.

Well done!!

Add a PLO one

Can we get medium stakes? $10 to $1000 is a pretty large gap.

Sounds fabulous.

This lol. I get why you're doing this and I might just play if I'm around here but something bigger would be nice if this works well. 50-100 bucks, like 2 hours or so.

$100/2 hours FTW!

Now we need a name, something between the concepts of cage and playpen. How about the sandbox? lol

When is registration open for this? I saw it yesterday for about 5 minutes and now it is gone.

Got it. The Playground. Marketing page: "Can you come out to play?"

Can we have the 6 max hyper sattys running 24/7

Looking at the picture at the top of the page, is your marketing page slogan the double entendre that I think it is?

Played one today, was a ton of fun. Solid idea from WPN so far.

Yeah, I watched the twitch stream. It seemed to go well.

Hey cool promo. If the playpen works out you could run that playground idea alongside it.

A+ > will definitely be playing if I can make it.