The guaranteed prize pool tournament is actually not that old in online poker history, but it has become a staple of the online poker tournament scene simply because of the extra information that players get from it. Even something as simple as the minimum prize pool versus the registration cost can give a savvy online poker player an idea of the return on investment. This will allow them to figure out if the tournament is worth participating in from their own point of view.

PKR like other online poker sites have gladly adopted the guaranteed prize pool tournament as one of the mainstays of their online poker tournament offerings, but they have now created a new term that can be used too. This term is Expected Prize Pool tournament or EXP and it is an interesting idea that is really taking the world by the storm.

The idea of the EXP is quite simple. For every online poker tournament that has the EXP attached to it, PKR will take data from previous tournaments that were run in a similar fashion and at a similar traffic level and combine that data with their own protections in order to create a final idea of how many buy-ins are expected for a given tournament. This figure will then lead to an expected prize pool for the tournament which will be displayed on the tournament lobby information page for anyone registering in the tournament to see.

The EXP is not a minimum representative figure like the guaranteed prize pool, but in most cases it is a very accurate estimation of the overall prize pool and therefore it should function as a similar figure of note for people doing investment calculations before buying in. Once the late registration period ends for a tournament, the EXP figure will naturally change to the actual prize pool and players will get the chance to see how close the estimate really was.

As with most new innovations, it will likely take some time before PKR’s EXP gets accepted into the wider community, but at the very least it is a neat new innovation for online poker players to check out.