Winner gained entry via $11 satellite
How about some news that is in no way related to the coronavirus pandemic? On Tuesday, Brazilian online poker player “AAAArthur” won the PokerStars Sunday Million’s 14th Anniversary edition and $1,192,802 after a four-way deal at the final table.
That truckload of money is just a tad more than AAAArthur had even won. His (we’ll call AAAArthur a guy because of his screen name) largest online cash before that: $91. Hell, even I have won more than $91 in a tournament before. I have not, however, won more than $1 million before, so he’s got me there.
The 14th Anniversary edition of the $215 buy-in Sunday Million had a guaranteed prize pool of $12.5 million. No problem. With 93,016 entries, composed of 60,898 unique entries and 32,118 re-entries, prize pool ballooned to $18,602,300. That is the largest prize pool ever on PokerStars.
AAAArthur won his entry into the tournament via an $11 satellite.
Four-way deal worked out for all
There was interest by a few players at the final table to talk deal, but it was not until it got down to four that things were really discussed. The final four decided to pause the tournament to see the numbers based on ICM and when they were presented, they all agreed to the sums, leaving $50,000 on the table for which to play.
It was a solid deal for everyone. AAAArthur easily got the worst end of it, but that usually happens when someone is a big chip leader. They give up potential first place money for a guaranteed lesser, yet still sizable, payout. He had 866 million chips at the time, twice as much as the second place player, Stefan “CrAzY_sTeFaN” Piele Dragos. The scheduled first prize was $1,509,390.01, but AAAArthur accepted over $300,000 less than that. Again, makes sense. One hand could have changed everything, so still locking in over a million bucks is not a bad idea at all.
The next payout would have been $1,031,584.64 and Dragos was willing to take less: $921,328.12. $100,000 is a lot to sacrifice, but he was in a much riskier position, much closer to the third and fourth place contestants than he was to AAAArthur. He could have easily found himself gone in third or fourth place.
As it tends to happen, the bottom two players got more than they would have if they bowed out in the same order. Third place would have been worth $705,059.41, but “salonteskis” got $826,919.68. And “caroline2963” received $786,873.65 in the deal when fourth place was originally worth $481,889.85. I know I would have been overjoyed with that fourth place pickup.
As it turned out, it worked out very well for the bottom two, as caroline2963 finished third, so her deal still made her more money than she would have and salonteskis slipped to fourth. The deal made him a ton more than he would have if they had played it out.
Prior to this, the largest prize pool for an anniversary Sunday Million was $12,268,400 in last year’s tournament.
