The Festival Online at 888poker Hands Out Almost $1.2 Million

The Festival Online, hosted by 888poker, played the final games of the series on August 1, and by most measures, it was a pretty big success. The final total for prizes awarded was just shy of $1.2 million, with most of the events on the schedule meeting or beating the pre-series promises.

The action for The Festival Online kicked off on July 16 with more than 50 games planned across two weeks of online poker action. Eight games fell short of the guarantees, but the differences were pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, and the nearly $1.2 million in total prizes awarded was well above the $888k guaranteed across the series.

That put the festival more than 30% above the pre-series guarantees, which was undoubtedly helped by both major tournaments crushing their guarantees. The Main Event on 888poker had $200k promised but ended up playing for $238,760, while the $150k guaranteed Mystery Bounty (Event #31) ended up with a prize pool of $163,200.

For the eight games that missed their guarantees, just under $19k in overlay was required to meet the pre-series promises. That was pretty quickly offset by more than $90k in fees collected across the series, so it was fairly easy for the operator to cover the differences for those specific games.

2023 The Festival Online

The Festival Online Main Event Nearly 20% Over Guarantee

As always, the biggest game of The Festival was the Main Event. With $200k guaranteed and multiple starting flights throughout the series, the Main Event got 1016 entries for a total prize pool of $238,760. That was 19.38% over the guarantee, but that was not even the best increase by percentage.

The most significant increase on a guarantee for the whole series came in Event #17, the $320 Mystery Bounty game on July 20. Canadian “algsxr” took that one down for one of three titles he won this series, and the final prize pool ended up nearly double the $12k guarantee for a total of $23,400.

That game was the best of six games, with prizes at least 50% above their guarantees. The biggest prize pool of all the games with 50% or better in prizes came from the $525 Mystery Bounty High Roller Finale, which got a prize pool of $37,500 on a guarantee of $25k for precisely 50% more.

Events #31 and #51 were the biggest tournaments in terms of raw prize pools and also extra dollars in prizes. #51, the Main Event, got an additional $38,760 in prizes, whereas #31, the multi-day Mystery Bounty game, earned an extra $13,200. Three other games got at least $10k extra in the prize pool.

National Standings

Brazil led the way in The Festival Online this time around with 13 titles. The South American powerhouse is one of the fastest-growing poker markets in the world right now, and the country of about 218 million people bagged 13 total titles across the series, more than 20% of the games.

Canada and the UK tied for second in the national standings with six titles each, but Canada’s six were heavily weighted to a single player going by the alias “algsxr.” They are a regular at the 888poker high-stakes tables, and they had an excellent series booking three of Canada’s six titles.

2023 The Festival Online National Results