Live tournament tours have been very successful and therefore lucrative for the Poker Stars online poker site. As a result, they have pushed the envelope on creating more of them, but the European Poker Tour (EPT) has been one of their most successful for a long time. It is entering its seventh incarnation in the summer of 2010 and satellites to the various events will start running on Poker Stars during the month of June.

Satellite tournaments at Poker Stars will allow players to enter for a relatively small amount of money and through winning those tournaments parlay that money into a seat at one of the larger events which in turn can be parlayed into a significant payday. The most celebrated example of such an occurrence is of course the back-to-back WSOP Main Event wins of Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer in 2003 and 2004 respectively. The two amateurs entered satellite tournaments on Poker Stars for tens of dollars and both ended up winning millions from that small entry.

One does not even have to go back that far in order to see this type of success in satellite tournament victories as the EPT itself has seen such things happen. Nicolas Chouity ended up winning his seat in the EPT Monte Carlo event in 2009 through a satellite tournament on Poker Stars with an entry fee of $22. Fast forward to the end of the live tournament and he was able to parlay that meagre buy-in into a final prize amount of EUR 1.7 million (approximately $2.5 million).

The lesson to be learned here is that both the live tournaments and their Poker Stars satellites are to be taken seriously. This year, the EPT will have regularly run stops in places like Barcelona (Spain), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Prague (Czech Republic). However, they will also be mixing it up a little bit with the opening event taking place August 11th to August 16th in Tallinn, Estonia and the closing event going at both a date and a place as of yet undisclosed. More details will be following soon from Poker Stars including details about the online satellite tournaments that will feed into these larger live events.