PokerStars Sees 253,698 Players Enter $0.01 Tournament

On Monday, October 5th, PokerStars broke its own world record for the largest ever online poker tournament after 253,698 players took part in the $0.01 Common Cents Kick- Off event. The tournament was part of a new micro-stakes festival running from October 5-11, and featuring 14 Common Cents tournaments with entries ranging from between $0.11 to $0.99.
The $0.01 buy-in tournament created a prize pool worth $2,536.98, with PokerStars then adding a further $97,463.02 to that tally to ensure its $100,000 guaranteed prize pool. As mentioned on the PokerStars blog:
“The one-cent buy-in tourney was bound to draw a crowd. With a $100,000 guarantee and $10,000 first prize, anybody with a penny in their account couldn’t justify missing it. ”
As it turned out, the number of players entering the event was 28,698 more than the previous world record set by PokerStars in 2013 of 225,000, helped along by a late registration period. Even without the extra one-hour long registration, however, the world record would still have been smashed as 238,000 players had already entered the event in time for the first hand to be dealt.
The competition subsequently took six hours and 38 minutes to complete, with ‘DaDumon’ from Austria eventually walking away with its top prize of $10,000. That is lower than the amount won by the previous record holder, Mr.SlavaPro from Russia, who won $25,000 in 2013, although that event was a $1 buy-in, instead.
The latest huge turnout confirms PokerStars status of an online poker room that is light years ahead of its rivals in terms of popularity and marketing skills. In the meantime, US players could only dream about playing on a site which attracts such numbers, as the nation has only three regulated states, with just Delaware and Nevada, with a combined population of around 3.8 million people, agreeing to share their player pools. Great changes may lie ahead, though, after PokerStars was recently granted a license to operate in New Jersey last week.