Full Tilt Onyx Cup Series

Unfortunately, Full Tilt Poker has canceled the Onyx Cup Series. This page serves as an archive of what this tournament would have been.

It's a commonly held belief that no single tournament can determine a champion, as the cards play too great a role in choosing the winner. We have a rough idea of who the best poker players in the world are, with names like Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius and Tom Dwan springing to mind, but in large tournament fields like the World Series of Poker they are rarely forced to play one another. The Onyx Cup Series, the latest creation by Full Tilt Poker, will pit the best players in the world against each other in a series of six high roller tournaments which will determine, at long last, who the best player in the world is. If you think you've got what it takes to compete with the cream of the poker crop, Full Tilt Poker is offering five packages to the first of these extremely exclusive tournaments.

In order to be a fair test as to who the current best poker player in the world is, the Onyx Cup will not be decided by a single tournament, but rather by a series of six tournaments held throughout the year. To make the tournaments exclusive to players with a right to be there, all six tournaments in the series are high-roller events, with buy-ins ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The top players in each of the first five tournaments will receive Onyx Cup leaderboard points, and the players with the most leaderboard points will qualify for the $250,000 Grand Finale in Las Vegas in December, where the ultimate winner will be decided.

Every tournament of the Onyx Cup Series will be recorded so that it can be later aired on television in over forty countries around the world and in twenty different languages. In an awesome move by Full Tilt Poker, each of the six tournaments will be entirely rake free, and the Grand Finale will even have one million dollars added to the prize pool. It has long been argued by poker players that they should not have to pay tournament fees for televised events as poker, like any other sport, generates significant revenue from at-home viewers and this should be used to cover costs associated with hosting the event, just like in other professional sports.

The first event of the series will be a $100,000 buy-in tournament taking place in Las Vegas from May 11th to May 12th. It's pretty understandable if you don't have one hundred thousand dollars sitting down the back of your couch, which is why Full Tilt Poker is putting five highly coveted $105k prize packages up for grabs. There are three real money qualifiers with buy-ins of $600+40, $1,000+60 and $2,000+100, the first two awarding a single Onyx Cup Series Event 1 package, and the final qualifier awarding two packages. These buy-ins are also fairly steep, but Full Tilt is running a plethora of satellite tournaments to the qualifiers.

The fifth and final Event One package being put up for grabs can be won at absolutely no cost! Full Tilt has put together a series of freeroll tournaments to determine who receives the fifth package. Anybody can register for Round 1 Freerolls, and each of these awards four tickets to a Round 2 freeroll. These Round 2 Freerolls are held once per week, and each of these tournaments award a generous hundred tickets to the Final Freeroll. The Final Freeroll kicks off on May 1st at 15:15 ET and the winner of this tournament will, of course, walk away with an Onyx Series Event 1 prize package.

The Onyx Cup Series means different things to different people but it's clear that Full Tilt Poker has come up with something truly special. To five lucky players, it means their chance to prove themselves against the best in the business. To the poker elite, it's a chance to finally settle old rivalries and establish a hierarchy like in other professional level sports. Finally, for the rest of the poker world it offers us an as yet unmatched chance to watch the best of the best battle it out on our television screens, as the best poker player in the world surfaces.