It was just three days ago that we reported on the PartyPoker MILLIONS Online tournament speeding past the $10 million mark. At the time, it wasn’t certain whether the tournament would actually hit its $20 million guarantee – an ambitious move by the brand to try and outdo its main rival, PokerStars.
Yet, the historic moment has already been reached, with PartyPoker managing to smash and go far beyond its $20 million guarantee. Rather than linger around the $20 million mark, the prize pool has shot up to a massive $21.8 million, with a total of 4,637 entrants contributing towards that.
The first-place finish in the contest will end up receiving a huge pay-out of $2,729,376. As of now, 29 poker players remain in the tournament, including top-ten players Chance Kornuth and Chris Kruk.
It’s very easy for the hype around such an outstanding prize pool to overtake reality at times, but PartyPoker has proven that there was so much more to this guarantee. The MILLIONS Online tournament by the brand has simply smashed it out of the water and, in the process, created the biggest prize pool in online poker history. Prior to this, PokerStars held all positions in the top ten biggest prize pool events ever.
Of course, with a buy-in of $5,000 for the MILLIONS event, and with five opening flights to play through, the excitement was running high by the time things came to a close after Day 1D was over. As the days rolled by, even more entrants found themselves contributing to the PartyPoker pot.
PartyPoker Making History
It was just last year that the MILLIONS Online tournament began operating. Then, it had a guarantee of $5 million. So, you can imagine the sort of wonder and awe that came into effect when the PartyPoker brand chose to boost this up by $15 million. Even last year’s first-place victor, Jon van Fleet (who took home $1 million in that event), will no doubt have been shocked at the dramatic rise.
In this year’s contest though, the top 500 positions received pay-outs from the prize pool. The top four positions will gain the most from the MILLIONS tournament. Even the runner up will bank a total of $1.9 million to take home.
But just how much has PartyPoker outdone PokerStars by? Well, the biggest ever prize pool prior to this event was in 2010, when a WCOOP event featured a $12.2 million reward. This was won by the user “potterpoker”, who took home $2,278,097.50. So, you can imagine the jubilation of PartyPoker, who sped past that amount to almost $10 million more.
Speaking of the success of the MILLIONS Online tournament, John Duthie – creator of the European Poker Tour and manager of the MILLIONS Live events at current – said that this was an amazing achievement. “Players wanted this to happen and they wanted to do it with us”, he said in sincere happiness.
