One of the first promotions PokerStars started hyping for its 10th Anniversary was the Sunday Million tournament scheduled for December 18th, 2011. Yesterday’s tournament touted an impressive $10 million guarantee as well as a $2 million guaranteed prize for the winner of the historic event. The undertaking was considered extraordinary in the current online poker market (US players are barred from playing at PokerStars) and considering the Sunday Million features a modest $215 buy-in.

In order to reach the guaranteed prize-pool of $10 million the tournament would need over 46,000 entrants! Well, PokerStars didn’t need to kick in any money to reach the guaranteed prize-pool of $10 million, in fact the total prize-pool surged well beyond that number, topping out at an astounding $12, 423,200!!!

Not only did this set a new record for Sunday Million prize-pools, it also broke the record for the largest prize-pool of any tournament in online poker history; besting the old mark of $12,215,000 set during the Main Event of 2010 WCOOP at PokerStars. It took an astonishing 62,116 players to reach the record-breaking number, with over 7,000 players making the money in the tournament –a number most tournaments would be ecstatic about if was the overall attendance.

There was definitely a lack of big-name players at the final table, which likely led to the 6-way chop, with the winner of the tournament being an unemployed Canadian player, Kyle “First-Eagle” Weir, whose previous high score in poker was a $4,000 score!

The $2 million first-place prize was eventually chopped-up when the final six players in the tournament cut a deal that saw each player pocket at least $580k. Amazingly, the runner-up in the event, a player using the screen-name “unstoffable”, took home the smallest amount of money, while the 5th place finisher pocketed nearly $1 million thanks to the equity-chop during six-handed play. Here is a look at all of the final table payouts from the historic Sunday Million:

1. Kyle “First-Eagle” Weir – $1,146,574.65*

2. Unstoffable – $580,724.34*

3. BLAABAR – $709,896.78*

4. tunafish919 – $627,317.26*

5. Dimedroll – $995,996.85*

6. SkunDen – $758,986.42*

7. fireballdio – $182,406.00

8. kaalen – $119,866.80

9. yokouno1980 – $86,512.56

*Denotes 6-way deal

For anyone who was interested in watching the best poker players in the world battle it out Sunday they could simply have railed the 10th Anniversary High-Roller tournament that was also running on PokerStars. 187 of the top online poker players ponied-up the $10,000 entry-fee, generating a prize-pool of $1.87 million.

The winner of the tournament was Joey Lawrence (not THAT Joey Lawrence, who goes by the screen-name jcl87 at Stars. Lawrence defeated an absolutely stacked final table for the outright win, including online legends Dan “djk123” Kelly, Kevin “stammdogg” Stammen, Grayson “gray31” Ramage, and Chris “imDaNuts” Oliver. Here is a look at the payouts for the final table of the 10th Anniversary High-Roller tournament:

1. Joey “jcl87? Lawrence – $402,050.00

2. Grayson “gray31? Ramage – $289,850.00

3. Keven “Stammdogg” Stammen – $219,725.00

4. Ashley “DYBYDX” Mason – $163,625.00

5. Chaaai – $112,200.00

6. Chris “ImDaNuts” Oliver – $93,500.00

7. montecarlo13 – $74,800.00

8. Dan “djk123? Kelly – $56,100.00

9. Greenstone25 – $37,400.00

Tags: 1 Million, 10 Million, 10th Anniversary, Amount Of Money, Attendance, Chop, Guarantee, High Score, main event, Online Poker, Place Finisher, PokerStars, Pool Tournament, Prize Pool, Promotions, Record Pools, Screen Name, Tabl, Undertaking, WCOOP, Weir

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Poker Promotions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.