GGPoker tournaments: weekly majors, big series and how to qualify

GGPoker tournaments run around the clock, from cent-level Flip & Go events to the $10,300 GGMillion$ every Sunday. The backbone is the GGMasters brand, with daily events and a Sunday flagship guaranteeing $1 million, surrounded by bounty tournaments, satellites and several online series a year that guarantee tens of millions of dollars.

Schedules and guarantees change from month to month, so we don’t list a fixed timetable here. Instead, this guide explains the event types GG keeps coming back to, the formats you’ll meet in the lobby and how to qualify cheaply for the big ones. Where we quote figures, they’re what we saw during our check in October 2026; the tournament lobby always has the current numbers.

The regular weekly schedule

Outside the big series, a typical GGPoker week is built around a few recurring brands.

GGMasters

GGMasters is GG’s signature tournament. The main event runs on Sundays with a $150 buy-in; during our check it guaranteed $1 million, up from $300,000 when the brand launched. From Monday to Saturday a ladder of $25 GGMasters events (classic, double stack, bounty and turbo versions among them) usually guarantees between $40,000 and $100,000 each.

There’s also a GGMasters High Rollers event on Sundays at $1,050, and bounty specials at higher buy-ins on the weekend. All GGMasters events are freezeouts: one entry per player, no re-entries.

GGMillion$

At the top of the schedule sits GGMillion$, a $10,300 high roller on Sundays that guarantees at least $2 million. It’s one of the most-watched online tournaments, with final tables streamed and the world’s best players in the field. For most readers it’s a spectator event, though satellites make a seat possible for far less.

Daily and Sunday guarantees

Around these brands run hundreds of daily guaranteed tournaments at every buy-in level, in No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha, plus bounty events and hypers for short sessions. Sunday is the busiest day, with the largest guarantees across the board.

Buy-in ladder: where each bankroll fits

One of GG’s strengths is that every bankroll has a home. To give a sense of the range, here are typical buy-ins from our October 2026 check, from the cheapest to the most expensive:

A common bankroll guideline for tournaments is to keep at least 100 buy-ins for your usual level, because even strong players go long stretches without a big score. Tournament results swing far more than cash games; our guide to variance in poker explains why.

Tournament formats on GGPoker

The lobby mixes classic and GG-specific formats. The standard ones work as they do anywhere:

• Freezeout: one entry, and you’re out when your chips are gone. See freezeout poker.
• Re-entry: you can buy in again during late registration after busting. Rebuys and add-ons work differently; see rebuys and add-ons.
• Progressive knockout (PKO): part of each buy-in goes into bounties; knocking a player out wins part of their bounty and adds the rest to yours.
• Turbo and hyper: faster blind levels for shorter sessions.

GG also runs formats of its own, and these are worth understanding before you register.

Mystery Bounty

In a Mystery Bounty tournament the bounties switch on late, usually from Day 2 or once the field is down to the money places. Each knockout wins a sealed bounty whose value is revealed only when you draw it, from small amounts up to a top prize that can be worth more than first place. GG was the first online site to run them, and they appear mostly during series.

Flip & Go

Flip & Go skips the slow early stage. In the Flip phase each player gets three hole cards, discards one, and every hand is played all-in until one player is left at each table. Making a straight or flush with your three cards doubles your stack; trips triple it and a straight flush quadruples it. Survivors then move to the Go phase, a normal No-Limit Hold’em tournament with fast levels. Standard buy-ins start at $0.05.

Ocean KO

Ocean KO is a newer bounty format GG introduced in its October 2026 bounty series. Its $5 opener set a world record for an online poker tournament with 420,084 entries.

Bounty formats change the maths of calling all-ins. A call that loses money on chips alone can be right when it also wins a bounty, especially a large one. Our guide to tournament types and strategy covers the adjustments.

The big series GG runs every year

Several times a year GG builds its schedule around a series: hundreds of events over a few weeks, with guarantees far above a normal week. Names and dates shift, but the same types come back each year. For a sense of scale, these are the series GG ran in 2026, as reported at the time:

• GGMillion$ Week: high-stakes events centred on a $10K main event. The January 2026 edition guaranteed over $25 million in total.
• GGMasters anniversary: a celebration of the brand each January–February with a $150 event guaranteeing many times the usual Sunday amount; $10 million in 2026.
• Bounty Hunters Series: bounty-only series run several times a year. The July and October 2026 editions each guaranteed $80 million, with buy-ins from $5.40.
• GG World Festival: the biggest series of the year in 2026, running from May to June with $300 million guaranteed; GG reported paying out $352 million across about 6.2 million entries.
• WSOP Online: official World Series of Poker bracelet events on GGPoker, usually in late summer. The 2026 edition had 33 bracelets and a $5,000 main event guaranteeing $25 million.

Guarantees in GG series are usually met. Across the 1,536 events of the 2026 World Festival there were about 70 overlays, where the prize pool fell short and GG paid the difference, adding up to just over $800,000. That’s welcome for players in those events, but it’s a small share of a series that paid out hundreds of millions, so don’t count on overlays when choosing what to play.

Series aren’t only for big bankrolls. Each one includes low buy-in events, often from around $5, with the same branding and bigger fields than usual. For a recreational player, a few of these during a series week offer the best shot at a large score for a small stake.

Series announcements appear on GG’s promotions page and in the client a few weeks ahead, along with satellite schedules. If you want to play one, start qualifying early: the satellite tree is widest in the weeks before the main events.

Satellites and the road to live events

Satellites let you win a seat in a bigger tournament for a fraction of its buy-in. On GG they come in two main forms:

• Direct satellites award tickets to a specific event. The maths is simple: if 100 players each put $15 into the prize pool, it buys ten $150 seats, so one player in ten qualifies.
• Step tournaments work like a staircase: win at one level and you get a ticket to the next, more expensive one.

To see how far the staircase can go, take WSOP Express, GG’s qualifying path to the live WSOP Paradise festival in the Bahamas, as it ran during our check. It starts with free or $0.50 entry steps, passes through All-in or Fold and Spin & Gold games, reaches a $150 step and ends at a weekly $2,500 super satellite that awarded over 25 packages worth $30,000 each.

Satellite tickets have a target event and often an expiry date. Check both before you play: a ticket to an event you can’t attend is worth only what you can get for it, and some tickets can’t be exchanged for cash.

How to find and register for a tournament

Everything happens in the tournament tab of the client or app. The steps are the same on desktop and mobile:

1. Open the tournaments tab and filter by game, buy-in range and format (for example bounty or turbo).
2. Sort by start time or guarantee to see what’s coming up.
3. Open an event to check its structure: starting stack, blind levels, late registration period, re-entry rules and payouts.
4. Click Register. If you hold a ticket for that event, the client offers to use it instead of cash.
5. Before the start you can usually unregister and get your buy-in back.

Start times in the lobby are shown in your local time zone, but series announcements are often quoted in GMT or UTC. When a big event is advertised for “18:00 GMT”, check the lobby rather than converting in your head.

Read the structure tab before you register for anything unfamiliar. Two tournaments with the same buy-in can play very differently: a deepstack with 20-minute levels gives you hours of play, a hyper with 3-minute levels is over far sooner and leaves much less room for decisions.

Fees, late registration and re-entries

Every tournament buy-in has two parts: the prize pool contribution and GG’s fee. Using the Sunday GGMasters as an example, the $150 buy-in splits into $138 for the prize pool and a $12 fee, which is 8%. The fee is what earns you points in GG’s rewards programme; see GGPoker rakeback for how that works.

Most events allow late registration, often for several hours. Since 2023 GG seats late registrants at a random table, moving other players if needed, to stop players from arranging to sit together by joining at the last moment. If you’re moved shortly after someone registers late, that’s why.

Re-entry rules vary by event and are shown in the tournament lobby before you register. Freezeouts such as GGMasters allow one entry; many daily tournaments allow one or more re-entries during late registration. Late registration also means you’ll often join with fewer big blinds than the starting stack; deciding when that’s worth it is part of tournament strategy around the bubble and the late stages.

Can you play GGPoker tournaments from the US?

No. GGPoker doesn’t accept real-money players from the United States. Its sister brand WSOP.com, run by the same parent company, offers real-money online poker in a handful of states with legal online poker, including Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Elsewhere in the US, GG’s ClubGG app runs social games that aren’t real-money GGPoker.

Players outside the US may also find their country uses a local GG site with its own tournament schedule, or isn’t served at all. Our GGPoker countries guide lists which site covers which country, and the full GGPoker review covers the rest of the site.

Monthly and series leaderboards add extra prizes for tournament regulars; see our GGPoker leaderboards guide.

GGPoker tournaments FAQ