Thursday, 28th March 2024 15:04
Home / Features / How To…Play PokerStars Grand Tour

Grand Tour is one of the best new games launched on PokerStars over the past few months, ticking all the boxes demanded of most low-stakes recreational players. It’s quick, fun and contains a number of built-in bonuses that can turn a meagre buy-in into a grand payday.

If you haven’t given it a crack yet, here’s a step-by-step guide to joining the fray. It’s really very easy indeed.

Fig 1. – Find Grand Tour in the main lobby

1. Grand Tour is located in the main list of games at the top of your screen, so get started by clicking there. There’s a real money and a play money version, so make sure you’ve got the right box selected in the top right (see fig. 1). This brings you to the Grand Tour lobby, which already looks different from what you might be used to.

2. Grand Tour is a series of single-table bounty tournaments, called sprints, through which you progress along the road towards the chequered flag. If you win a low buy-in sprint, you qualify for the next step with a higher entry fee, paid by what you have already earned. If you “complete” the Grand Tour — ie., win all the sprints — you get a significant payout, of which more later.


MORE ABOUT GRAND TOUR:
INTRODUCING GRAND TOUR | OP-POKER’S TOP FIVE TIPS
OFFICIAL GRAND TOUR PAGE | ALL BLOG REPORTS


The lobby here looks like a cycling race through some beautiful bucolic French landscapes (see fig. 2). The road wends from the bottom left to the chequered flag at the top centre, with Paris looming in the background. Along the way, you’ll see a number of check-points, labelled with a cash value — from $1 through $2, $5, $12, $25 and $60. These represent the various buy-ins for the single-table tournaments. Many players will want to start at the $1 level and then move up and up and up, but it’s worth remembering that you can start your tour and buy in at whatever level you choose.

Fig. 2 – The beautiful Grand Tour lobby

Click one of the buy-in values and you’ll soon be seated alongside three other players who are similarly prepared to pay that buy-in to play — either starting their Grand Tour afresh, or having qualified to that step.

Remember, if you don’t win a tournament, your race is over. You need to start this process again.

It’s also worth noting that you only pay your 10 percent rake at the entry level you choose. So if you buy-in for $1, you pay 10 cents. If you win the sprint and move up to the next level, you enter that second sprint rake free.


READ OP-POKER’S TOP FIVE GRAND TOUR TIPS


3. Each tournament along the way is played as a four-handed hyper turbo sit and go, with a progressive knockout bounty. All of those elements are significant and combine to make the Grand Tour unique.

Winning bounties is a key component in Grand Tour

Firstly, the four-handed table means you only ever have a maximum of three opponents. That’s one more than you’re used to encountering in a Spin & Go, but at least two fewer than most ring games.

Secondly, the hyper turbo structure means that blinds rise very rapidly indeed. You’ll be short-stacked in next to no time, whether or not you’re winning pots.

Finally, the PKO element means that there’s a bounty on everyone’s head from the very start. Half of the buy-in for a particular sprint goes into the bounty pot. You can win money every time you knock out an opponent, but they can also win money for knocking you out, so it quickly becomes a dog eat dog world.

Your ultimate aim is to build your personal value to $100, at which point you can cash out — claiming your own bounty, as well as all the money you’ve won for knocking out other players. This will typically happen when you win the $60 buy-in tournament — and “complete” the Grand Tour.

4. As you are playing one of the tournaments, you can see your overall progress towards the chequered flag in the top right of the screen (see fig. 3), alongside your latest bounty total. (The top figure is your progress in the race; the amount of bounties you have accrued already is below that. Remember, if you get knocked out, you only take away the bounty total.)

Fig 3.

The value of any player’s bounty also appears beneath their username, and if you click the small dropdown symbol beside it (see fig. 4), you can see the reward on offer for knocking that player out. You’ll notice that the reward is displayed as a range. That’s one of the Grand Tour’s bonuses: the bounties are randomised and will sometimes be multiplied many times over, until they are worth many times more than the stakes you’re playing.

Fig. 4

You only find out specifically how much a bounty is worth once it’s awarded. (Full details of Grand Tour multipliers can be found in the tables at the bottom of the Grand Tour page.)

As with all PKO tournaments, your bounty value increases incrementally the further you get. You bring a new bounty total to every table you join, and your new opponents will have similar prices on their scalps.

4. If you win a sprint, your marker moves along the road towards the next checkpoint. If you feel that you’ve got some momentum behind you and you want to ride the wave, you can play the next sprint immediately. However, you’re also able to take a breather and restart your tour from this point whenever you feel like. It makes Grand Tour really useful if you’ve only got a limited amount of time to play.

A $4.30 marker laid down will get you into a $5 sprint

You will note that as you get further along the road, you will be matched against players who have a similar sized bounty as you — similar, but not necessarily exactly the same. That’s because everyone will emerge from previous sprints having won slightly different bounty values. The relative real-money value is reflected in the number of chips each player gets at the start of the next sprint.

In figure 5, OP-Poker’s Nick Walsh has just qualified for a $12 sprint even though his bounty is worth $9.02. You can see his chip stack is smaller at the start of the sprint than each of his opponents.

Figure 5: Starting a new sprint

5. Your ultimate goal is to get your value beyond $100 at the end of a sprint. As and when this happens, you can cash out your own bounty plus any others you have won. With the multipliers in place, you could be on for a sensational payday.

As with all new formats, the best way to get to grips with Grand Tour is to try it out and see how you go. There are many learning resources available already, including from PokerStars School’s Pete Clarke and OP-Poker’s Nick Walsh.

Time to saddle up and get racing!

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