Bubble Protection Offers Poker Players Insurance Against Near Misses

One of the most frustrating positions to find yourself in during a poker tournament is busting out on the bubble. In fact, for many players, the amount of time wasted without winning a prize actually makes bubbling feel worse than getting eliminated by a cooler in the early going of a tournament.

With that in mind, a few enterprising minds have created a website devoted to selling “insurance” of a sort that protects players that are on or near the bubble. Called Bubble Protection, the service allows players to purchase a policy before the start of a tournament that will pay them back their entire entry fee and buy-in automatically if they end up busting on the bubble.

Of course, landing exactly on the bubble as the last player out of the money is unlikely, especially in a large-field online tournament. In the Bubble Protection program, players get paid out if they are on a “bubble” that’s considered to be exactly 10% of the size of the field. For instance, if there’s a 1,000 player tournament, the bubble will be considered to go 100 players deep. If the top 150 make the money, players 151-250 will see their Bubble Protection claims paid automatically.

While the service is brand new, they already have some pretty heavy hitters set up to help promote it. Browsing around BubbleProtection.com, you’ll see online poker legend Chris Moorman introducing the service and explaining each aspect of the site.

With policies costing 12% of the combined entry fee and buy-in for each event, it doesn’t take much to see that the insurance policies are at least ostensibly profitable for the site. If every player purchased bubble insurance for every tournament they covered, the site would be guaranteed a profit, since they’d only be on the hook for paying 10% of the players. That said, it’s not certain that this is a bad deal for all players; certainly, there are some very tight (but not entirely bad) players who tend to finish high in tournaments but not cash often who may fit into the 10% bubble far more than 12% of the time.

At the moment, the Bubble Protection service is available only on most PokerStars, iPoker and PartyPoker tournaments, though the company plans to expand the product to additional networks in the near future.