The record for the world’s largest online poker tournament was broken over the weekend, as 35,000 players turned out for the $11 buy-in $500,000 Guaranteed event on PokerStars. The tournament was specifically designed to attract the largest field ever. In the end, stan34powa parlayed his $11 into a $30,000 first place payday.
The tournament was capped at 35,000 players and the top 8,750 finished in the money. At the end of the day, the top four players received at least $10,000 with stan34powa pacing the field for three times that amount. The victor hails from France and rolled through the enormous field, which featured a fleet of 3,500 tables in progress at its inception. The tournament began at 3:30pm ET on Sunday afternoon and ran for nine and a half hours, wrapping up just past 1:00am ET early Monday morning.
Other players who cracked the top ten in the record-breaking event were meiky777 (second place for $20,000), rumred14 (third place for $15,000), Goldman007 (fourth place for $10,000), Nekochan48 (fifth place for $7,500), gustave44 (sixth place for $5,000), n0ideahh (seventh place for $3,500), alepolice (eighth place for $2,500), ONE_TIMEE (ninth place for $2,000), and FuFish (tenth place for $1,500). One-quarter of the field finished in the money. Play was dealt ten-handed and blind levels lasted just ten minutes each.
The winner’s payday was 6% of the total prize pool of $500,000 and second place received just 4%. To put those numbers in perspective, the winner of this week’s Sunday Million on PokerStars received 10.2% of the prize pool. Second place grabbed 7.0% as part of the online poker room’s high-stakes weekly tournament, the largest recurring prize pool offered online.
This weekend, the Sunday Million saw its guarantee increased by $1 million to $2.5 million as part of the World Record Week on PokerStars. Lp_SakiSaki took first, pocketing a sizable payday of $331,379. He outlasted a field of 16,260 entrants, which created a prize pool of over $3.2 million, shattering the guarantee. Coming in second place was Beufford, who grabbed $227,640. Others at the final table of the Sunday Million yesterday were MauryFishant (third place for $162,600), k0rt (fourth place for $130,080), manifest23 (fifth place for $97,560), salmor (sixth place for $73,170), AAmerican (seventh place for $50,406), La_Alvarado (eighth place for $32,520), and kharak (ninth place for $22,764).
Last year, PokerStars attempted to set the record for the world’s largest online poker tournament and attracted 26,517 players to an $11 buy-in $100,000 Guaranteed event. This time around, it maxed out its capacity. The world’s largest online poker room was also striving to set the mark for “Most Players to Simultaneously Play Poker Online” by breaking its old record of 213,000. At the start of the World Record Tournament, PokerStars hosted a total of 250,500 players.
There were 80 players who dropped out during hand for hand play on the bubble of the $11 buy-in tournament. The heads-up contest between stan34powa and meiky777 lasted 57 hands, with the latter entering with a 2:1 chip lead after eliminating the third and fourth place players. On the final hand of the tournament, the two players pushed their chips into the middle after a flop of 8-5-3 with two spades. stan34powa held 8-2 for top pair and meiky777 flipped over Big Slick. Needing an ace or king, meiky777 saw the turn and the river come a jack and seven, respectively. After dawn in his native France, stan34powa became the champion of the largest tournament ever held, $30,000 richer for his efforts.
PokerStars’ team of pros includes Chris Moneymaker (who many would consider to be the man who started the modern poker boom), Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer, and Daniel Negreanu.