To celebrate ten years of operation, PokerStars has announced a series of promotions, including a special Sunday Million multi-table tournament (MTT) with a guaranteed prize pool of $10m.
Scheduled for December 18, the anniversary special – which includes at least a $2m first prize – will require over 45k participants to cover the prize pool. It is thought to be the largest guarantee in online poker history.
The Sunday Million, a weekly $215-buyin tournament with a $1m guarantee, has been running for over five years. And it always covers its guarantees: the largest ever, held in March of this year, saw almost 60k participants vie for a prize pool of nearly $12m.
The only other online poker tournament thought to have passed the $10m prize pool mark was the main event of the WCOOP – a 5k buy-in event of PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker – in 2010, with 2.3m in prizes.
So although the anniversary special will need to overshoot the guarantees to take the title as the largest online MTT in history, it will be all the more impressive in a post-Black Friday environment, where the global poker industry is thought to have shrunk at least 20%.
