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Promotional Offers Given During Live Poker Tournaments

If you play online poker, you’re familiar with how online poker rooms try and entice you with special offers and bonuses for playing at their site. Live poker rooms don’t offer welcome bonuses for playing in their room, but they do have certain giveaways, often tied to their poker tournaments, especially during larger poker tournament series.

For those of you looking to play in live poker tournaments, keep an eye out for some of these promotional giveaways. You won’t make a ton of money off of them usually, but they are a nice extra perk for playing in an event.

Meal Comps

One of the most commonly used incentives for playing in a poker tournament is meal comps or coupons. These can take a couple of different forms. For example, the World Series of Poker has often offered meal coupons with every buy-in for bracelet events. On average, they give you a discount of $10 at the poker kitchen. For those that play multiple events, these coupons can sometimes be combined.

Other poker rooms will offer meal comps, often to the casino buffet. This is usually a $15 value depending on the casino. For some casinos, you have to actually make it to the dinner break in order to get the meal comp. This is a small way to reward players that made it that far in the day’s play.

Free Merchandise / Swag

A common promotion for poker tournaments in live casino is SWAG or free merchandise giveaways. These range wildly depending on casino but can be anything from baseball caps to seat cushions. Often, the merchandise is specific to the casino or it may be old stock that the casino is just trying to get rid of. Whichever the case, there’s nothing wrong with free stuff.

Free Food / Snacks

In some cases, the poker room may provide food or snacks that you can eat during the event or during the meal breaks. When poker rooms provide snacks, you are usually looking at typical snack foods such as chips, candy, or small finger foods. There are exceptions as some casinos will put up a small buffet for players, but this is usually at smaller casinos.

Alcohol

This is a freebie that’s becoming less common at live casinos, but on occasion, you will find poker rooms that will give away free alcohol during poker events. Most commonly, this consists of beer or lower-grade liquors. Sometimes you will get lucky and they will give you most anything that’s served to regular patrons.

Keep in mind that poker rooms that offer alcohol to their players will usually limit you to about three beverages and they do keep track of how many drinks you have.

Prize Drawings

One fun giveaway that some poker rooms will have are prize drawings. These drawing range the gamut from cash prizes to appliances, and even tickets to major sporting events.

I once played at an event at the Bicycle Casino and they did a crazy giveaway where the first player to bust out of the event received a pair of courtside seat tickets for that day’s L.A. Lakers games. Twenty players open-shoved the very first hand and the person that busted ran at full speed to get up front.

This was during a period where the Lakers were good, so the tickets were worth over $1,000 each. The tournament was just a $500 buy-in.

Poker room promotions are a fun way to give back to players who buy into their events and to draw extra interest to tournaments. Not all promotional offers will be announced, but you can always ask the floor person or poker room manager about any promotions during poker tournaments.

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