A new website offering a unique take on poker sponsorship was launched recently, offering an easier way for online poker players to qualify for live poker tournaments and a fast track to poker sponsorship.

Buy-in Bank is a free poker rewards program, similar to most online poker room’s built-in VIP programs, but applicable to multiple sites.  Their users earn points based on monthly rake and receive their points into a Buy-in Bank Account.  It’s a new way to earn live tournament buy-ins without having to play a single satellite tournament.

Once a Buy-in Bank Account holder earns enough points, they are able to trade them in for buy-ins and sponsorship packages to a number of poker tours around the world, including:  the Aussie Millions, the Pokerstars.com European Poker Tour (EPT), the Spanish Poker Tour (SPT), the Asian Poker Tour (APT), and the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT), just to name a few.

In addition to their poker rewards program, Buy-in Bank also runs a biannual Online Poker League and offers its users a Road to Sponsorship promotion.

The first league will award a $3,500 sponsorship package to the winner, which can be applied to a number of poker tours around the world.  The league will also award several mini-sponsorship packages to players that top the leaderboard or go deep in the season ending tournament.  Mini-sponsorship packages include buy-ins to some smaller events in Las Vegas and hotel accommodation during the 2011 WSOP.  The Road to Sponsorship promotion provides Buy-in Bank users an opportunity to receive a backed sponsorship deal promoting Buy-in Bank at various live poker tournaments around the world.

PokerNewsBoy recently spoke with the founder of Buy-in Bank about the motivation behind this new poker sponsorship program and this is what he had to say:

“Throughout my career as a poker player, one of the biggest leaks to my bankroll was the time and money I spent playing satellite and step tournaments to live events.  Over the course of 5+ years, I only qualified for a single live event and the package didn’t even come close to covering the amount of money I lost playing in these kinds of tournaments.

Had I used that time and money playing my core games, full ring cash games and short-handed SNGs, I would have made a lot more money, which I could have used to directly buy into more live events.  Now that I have a child, I no longer have time to sit in front of the computer for 7 or 8 hours playing a single satellite tournament, so I was looking for an alternative to satellite tournaments, but couldn’t find one.

I came up with this method of simply rewarding players for their play volume with buy-ins and sponsorship packages to live events around the world.  By working with multiple poker rooms, our users can spread their bankroll across multiple sites and try out new sites to find rooms that are best suited to their core game.  Because our points are earned without tiers, users don’t have to worry about fitting in a few extra games to reach the next VIP level.

For recreational players who dream of playing live tournaments, it gives them a stronger motivation to play, because now they have a long-term goal.  For semi-pros who want to play a live tournament now and then, it helps them focus on their core games, without being distracted by satellites.  For pros looking for more exposure, it helps them play a lot more live tournaments and based on their performance at the events can even lead to a sponsorship deal with either us, one of our partner poker rooms, or a backer they meet at the events.”

If you are interested in learning more about this poker sponsorship program, you can visit Buy-in Bank at www.buyinbank.com.  If you input the referral code PNB when registering an account, you’ll receive 500 sponsorship points when you sign up, which is double their typical Welcome Bonus.

Tags: Buy-in Bank, poker sponsorship, www.buyinbank.com

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 6:48 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.