Over the weekend, the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars, generated the biggest field ever for its weekly Sunday Million. The $215 buy-in industry staple saw a whopping 19,377 players compete.
Accordingly, the Sunday Million also featured the largest prize pool in its history. A total of nearly $3.9 million was up for grabs in one of the richest online poker tournaments ever held. In the end, “OX45AL” banked a mammoth $550,000 for first place, outlasting fellow online poker player “celofyz33” heads-up. celofyz33 received a $332,000 consolation prize and the top 3,150 players finished in the money.
In the final hand of the super-sized Sunday Million, celofyz33 shoved with A-4 of clubs pre-flop, but OX45AL woke up with pocket queens. The board ran out 3-7-K-4-J and OX45AL boosted his bankroll by over a half-million dollars. Other PokerStars players who reached the final table on the record-setting day included eMarkM (third place for $244,616), OBVAMENTS (fourth place for $166,270), S.Takmaziyan (fifth place for $133,016), Kostya 77777 (sixth place for $99,762), Gmelkonyan (seventh place for $66,508), austinlewis (eighth place for $44,228), and hunter10999 (ninth place for $29,929). All told, a bevy of life-changing money was up for grabs during the Sunday afternoon contest.
To put the number of players in perspective, the 19,377 poker hopefuls who turned out for the Sunday Million represented 15 times the number of entrants in the Ultimate Bet Online Championship (UBOC) Main Event on Sunday, 2.5 times the number of runners in the Full Tilt $1.5 Million Guaranteed held as part of that site’s promotional week, and nearly 40 times the size of the field in the weekly Bodog $100,000 Guaranteed. The previous record for a Sunday Million field was 18,283, set in November. The Sunday Million Special Edition offered a $2 million guaranteed purse on January 31st, but that figure was easily shattered. Last November, the guaranteed prize pool was $2.5 million.
All of the traffic on the site meant an influx of players to its cash game tables. According to the traffic ranking site PokerScout.com, 50,820 real money ring game players logged into PokerStars at its peak on Sunday, only the third time that the site has ever eclipsed 50,000. PokerScout.com added, “This marks the first time any site has ever reached 50,000 real money cash game players outside of a milestone hand promotion.” Year over year, traffic on PokerStars is up by a solid 43%, while rival site Full Tilt Poker has seen its patronage swell by 67% over the same period.
Meanwhile, PokerScout.com noted that the traffic spike on Full Tilt Poker as a result of the introduction of Rush Poker seems to have fizzled. In a graph posted on the site, the percentage of players competing at Rush Poker tables has slumped from a high of 30% on January 22nd to just over 20% on January 31st. Players are allowed to open up to four Rush Poker tables and the high-speed action has resulted in up to 300 hands per hour being recorded.
Also on Sunday, PokerStars dished out four tickets to Super Bowl XLIV, which will unfold on February 7th from Dolphin Stadium in Miami. Two $11 buy-in tournaments were held, with the winners of each taking home two tickets to the big game on top of the standard prize pool payout. Each champ also claimed $1,000 in spending money, although last-minute hotel reservations in South Florida have been hard to come by.
PokerStars happily accepts players from the United States and features an arsenal of pros that includes World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event winners Tom McEvoy, Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem, Peter Eastgate, and 2009 champ Joe Cada.
