Betplay Poker has announced the Hive Series, a 28-day festival running April 27 to May 24, 2026 with a $100,000 guaranteed prize pool across the schedule and an unusual team-based meta-game layered on top of the tournaments. The series also opens with a one-off $2,000 depositor freeroll today, Friday April 24, at 1pm UTC.
The meta-game is what makes this series distinctive. Every player who joins is randomly assigned to one of four Hives: Golden Stingers, Royal Grinders, Venomous Vets, or Apex Swarm. Players cannot pick their Hive, and every hand played, every tournament entered, and every leaderboard point earned contributes to their colony's total over the four weeks. At the end of the series the Hive with the highest combined points is declared the winning swarm.
Layered underneath that is a weekly leaderboard structure paying $800 per week, split into $200 pools for the top performers in each Hive. On top of the cash prize, every weekly Hive leaderboard winner earns a guaranteed seat at the Coronation Tournament on May 24 - the series closer, a winner-takes-all $1,000 event for up to 16 "queens" crowned across the four weeks. One player can carry their colony by winning their Hive leaderboard every week, or a Hive can send four different queens. Whichever way it falls, the last one standing earns the "Empress of the Hive" title.
No choosing. You join the hive. You defend it with everything you have got. Up to 16 queens. One throne.
Betplay Poker Hive Series announcement
The schedule spans micro to high-roller stakes, with the $100K GTD spread across events tuned for every level of grinder. Betplay is pitching this as the biggest seasonal festival the room has ever run, and the mechanics back that up: $800 weekly leaderboards plus four weekly Queen avatars plus a final-day Coronation turns a standard MTT festival into something closer to a community league.
Before the series kicks off, Betplay is running a $2,000 depositor freeroll on April 24. Registration opens at 10:00 UTC and the tournament starts at 13:00 UTC. Any player who has made a deposit during the current week is eligible to enter, and the prize pool pays out in MTT tickets, Spins and exclusive bundles rather than cash. It is a warm-up promotion rather than part of the Hive Series proper, but it gives depositors a zero-risk path into the festival.
Betplay operates as a crypto-native site accepting BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC, LTC, XRP, DOGE, BNB, TON, TRON and SHIB. The operator behind the brand is LAMA TECH, LIMITADA, registered in San Jose, Costa Rica. As with any non-regulated crypto room, availability varies by jurisdiction and it is on the player to confirm that online poker is legal where they are before signing up.
The Hive Series is a sharper signal of where the mid-tier crypto poker market is heading in 2026. Rather than compete on headline guarantees with CoinPoker's CSOP or GGPoker's Million-dollar weekends, Betplay is investing in community mechanics: team identities, weekly status drops, avatar rewards, and a final-day showdown that only leaderboard grinders unlock. For a room of Betplay's size, that kind of player retention narrative is arguably more valuable than another $500K guarantee.