Online Poker Black Friday Sales: GGPoker & Stretch Network Cut Tournament Buy-Ins

Several online poker operators are once again using Black Friday as an opportunity to discount tournament buy-ins, with reductions of up to 90% on selected events. In 2025, GGPoker and the B2B-oriented Stretch Network are both bringing back their Black Friday sales for a second consecutive year, offering cheaper access to their regular MTT schedules without cutting posted guarantees.

Black Friday started as a US retail phenomenon marking the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. It is traditionally the Friday following Thanksgiving. In 2025, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 27, which means Black Friday is November 28.

What began as an offline retail event has long since spread online and across borders. Today, Black Friday and the surrounding “Cyber Monday” or “Cyber Week” marketing windows are widely used by e-commerce and digital services globally – including online poker rooms.

GGPoker is once again running a “Black Friday Sale” promotion that covers an entire week plus one extra day, from November 24 to December 1. Rather than launching a separate tournament series, the operator discounts buy-ins across a large portion of its existing daily schedule, while advertised guarantees remain unchanged.

Key points:

• Scope: Around 90 tournaments receive a reduced buy-in.
• Discount range: Approximately 25% to 90%.
• Average discount: Around 35% across the board.

Several well-known events are included:

• GGMasters: Buy-in drops from $150 to $99, with the $1,000,000 guarantee retained.
• Bounty Hunters High Roller Main Event: Buy-in cut from $525 to $262.50, still listed with a $1.5 million guarantee.
• The Weekender (phase event): Reduced from $50 to $30 while keeping its $250,000 guarantee.

The most aggressive cut appears on the Saturday Session: GGMasters Bounty, where the buy-in is reduced by 90%, from $108 to $10.80. The Saturday Knockout becomes one of the most affordable events in the promotion, dropping from $15 to $9.

In terms of distribution, the majority of discounted events fall into the 25% and 40% reduction tiers, with a smaller number receiving 50% or higher cuts and only one tournament at the top 90% tier.

From a player’s perspective, the main appeal is straightforward: significantly cheaper access to the same headline guarantees, which may increase the likelihood of overlays if the discounted fields do not fully expand to compensate for the lower price point.

The Stretch Network, which powers multiple partner skins and focuses on B2B services, is also revisiting its Black Friday promotion. Its sale is more compact in duration, running three days, from November 28 to 30.

The discounts apply to 16 tournaments in the World Poker League (WPL) schedule, with reductions again ranging from 25% up to 90%. However, Stretch uses a slightly different mechanism to deliver these discounts:

• For each discounted WPL event, the network offers a short “phase” tournament starting one hour before the target event.
• These phase tournaments last only about two minutes and act as a ticketing gateway.
• Players buy into the phase event at the discounted rate and are then automatically moved into the main tournament with a full starting stack.
• If someone is already registered directly in the target tournament and also plays the phase, their stacks are combined, effectively allowing them to build a larger starting stack.

This structure lets the network maintain its original WPL format while still giving players a clear and tangible buy-in reduction path during the Black Friday window.

Discounted tournament festivals are not new in online poker:

• 888poker frequently runs “Sale” campaigns and “Sunday Sale” versions of its flagship events, often using a simple model where buy-ins are cut by a fixed percentage (e.g., 50%) across an entire schedule.
• In the US regulated market, WSOP Online – which uses 888 software – regularly mirrors this approach with its own time-limited sale promotions.
• Other major brands, including PokerStars, iPoker, and Winamax, have also experimented with reduced-buy-in series or one-off discount days.

Players generally welcome cheaper entries and unchanged guarantees, especially when there is a chance for overlays. At the same time, some have questioned in past years how “real” a discount is if effective prize-pool distributions feel more in line with the lower buy-ins. Operators, for their part, argue that cutting the price of entry while keeping guarantees intact does constitute a genuine discount, even if field sizes adjust.

What is clear is that Black Friday has become a regular fixture on the online poker promotional calendar. In 2025, with GGPoker’s Black Friday Week starting on November 24 and Stretch Network’s WPL discounts running from November 28 to 30, players once again have multiple options to access major tournaments at a fraction of the usual cost.