In an attempt to welcome the New Year 2013, Poker rooms online offered major freerolls and other tournament prizes to their players. Most notable among st such New Year promotions was the Hangover Party at 888 Poker. Under this 888 Poker invited all its players (cash and non-cash) to play a $10,000 freeroll on 01/01/2013 at 16:02 GMT. The best part was there was no buy in and no deposit required thus was a freeroll in the true sense. Entry opened only 6 hours before the tourney began and within minutes the 8,000 seats were full.
PartyPoker also had a similar $12,000 freeroll promotion where players needed to earn party points through December and then earn tickets to any out of 6 freerolls. The freerolls had prize pools ranging from $2000 to $12,000. Calling them heavyweight prizes, players needed to earn 1000 party points to get access to the Heavyweight freeroll which had the mega prize of $12,000. $10,000 was the cruiser weight category with an entry criteria of 500 points.
Titan Poker decided to experiment differently and was giving away 5 Irish Open guaranteed packages to players. This special New Year package was called the Irish Open NYD Special and a Euro 160+Euro16 freeze out tourney was held on Jan 1st, 2013 at 20:00 GMT. Each of the 5 winners were guaranteed a Euro 3200 package to the Irish Open which is held on Easter each year. The package included the buy in to the main event plus 5 nights’ accommodation at the Hotel Burlington, Dublin which is the venue for Irish Open. This year the main event will take place between March 29th and April 1st 2013.