It was 2004, Barry Greenstein was on a boat, and he was sick in a way that the ship captain just couldn’t understand. A few days earlier, the Voyager of the Seas had set out from south Florida on a trip unlike any the boat had ever seen. Its manifest was covered in poker tables, chips, and the kind of online grinders who were springing up in the early post-Moneymaker months.
Barry Greenstein wanted to get off the ship. It’s something he remembers clearly some ten years later. He was among the world’s most famous players at the time, but he wanted off the boat so badly that he was willing to disembark in Haiti during the middle of a civil war.
Why? Well, as he explains below, it was River-itis.
A year later, PokerStars made the decision to get off the boat and move to Atlantis where it has been ever since. In just a few months, we will celebrate the 10th PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) with ten days of poker on dry land. In all, there will be 40 events from which to choose, and while we can’t guarantee you won’t come down with a little bit of River-itis, we can guarantee you won’t care so much about it when you have several miles of sand and sea around you. (And if you still need some revier therapy, Atlantis has a great Lazy River). What’s more, it will be made a lot easier if you can freeroll the whole thing.
For the next ten weeks, PokerStars is going to give out 100 packages to the PCA in tournaments that only cost ten bucks to enter. The tournaments run every Sunday at noon ET until December 9 and award the top ten players with $16,000 packages to the PCA. The tournaments kicked off yesterday, and these ten people earned their spots at the PCA.
While those tournaments offer some of the best value you will ever find, there are a ton of other tourneys and buy-ins to get you to the PCA, including, $33 rebuys, $215 satellites, $530 qualifiers, and the weekly $700 event. If you want to try even cheaper events, keep an eye out for the FPP Mega Path tourneys, as well as $1 and 10-cent tournaments.
What’s more, for the next five days (deadline October 13, you can score with the PCA deposit bonus and use your free ticket to win a PCA package. Four of those winners above got into the $10 tournaments with a deposit bonus ticket, and you can too if you deposit before October 13 using the correct bonus code.
So, get to work. There are still nine more weeks to go in the celebration, but you’ll want to get started early. You never know when that River-itis will strike!
Brad Willis is the PokerStars Head of Blogging.
