PokerStars Sets World Record

Poker News - July 21st, 2009 - Written by Bruce

This past Sunday PokerStars broke its own world record when they had 65,000 players all in one poker tournament. This shattered the previous record which they set back in December 2008 with 35,000 entrants. This weekend's tournament was appropriately called Guiness World Record and featured a small buy in of only $1. What makes the timing of this so interesting is that their main rival, online pokersite Full Tilt Poker, had annonced the week before that they were going to host a special tournament to break this very same record.

They scheduled a $5 buy in tournament which they called The Record Breaker. The tournament would have a cap of 50,000 players. PokerStars decided that they wanted to prove they were still the biggest online poker site and they quickly announced their intention to hold its own record breaking tournament.

Both tournaments filled up rather quickly and gave players a chance to win some big money off of a very small entry fee. The Full Tilt tournament had a guaranteed $250,000 prize pool, but the site decided to double it making it a $500,000 prize pool. Navigating through the massive 50,000 person field, breo40 emerged victorius earning him $45,000 on his $5 investment. The PokerStars tournament filled up and had a guaranteed prize pool of $65,000 which they also matched making it a $130,000 prize pool. Off of just a $1 investment, 004 license came out on top of the record breaking field earning him a nice payday of $13,000. The two poker sites truly made it a historic day for online poker and the players were the winners with the amount of free money that was added.