Poker Stars Enters The Guinness Book of World Records
Jan 25, 2009By: G.L. Hodges Poker Stars targeted a new record for the Guinness Book of World Records during the week of Christmas, 2008 and made their mark! By putting together a 35,000-player, $10+1 buy-in event with a guaranteed prize pool of $500,000 they successfully created the largest online poker tournament in history!
The landmark event was sold out days before the tournament was scheduled to take place and 8,750 lucky winners hit pay dirt in less than three hours, when eighty players were lost during hand-for-hand play on the bubble in the monumental 876-table event.
The web’s already well-known and largest poker site, Poker Stars kicked off a promotional World Record Week the week during Christmas 2008 to increase its already substantial player base as well as to gain further recognition with their attempts to blow apart two significant online poker records. The first history-making goal was to host the largest online poker tournament and the second was to capture the title of the most players to simultaneously play poker online. By the end of the weekend Poker Stars managed not only to raise the bar for competition, but also set it high for its own future attempts to surpass!
The Poker Stars Guinness World Record attempt for the Largest Online Poker Tournament brought in 35,000 players who paid $11 in high expectation of winning their share of the $500,000 prize pool. Poker Stars was out to beat their own unofficial record of 26,517 players, set in late 2007. Various other promotional offers were made throughout the Christmas holiday week to create the most possible publicity and player traffic and they obviously succeeded in their efforts!
In addition, because so many players registered for the $500,000 Guaranteed Event and with the influx of players joining in the other running promotions, Poker Stars also broke the record for the Most Players to simultaneously play poker online. With 250,500 players logged into the online poker site, a new world record was set that overtook the 213,000 record, once again having been set by Poker Stars on November 30th of last year. And even before that they had taken the record with 151,758 players on December 30th, 2007.
About 14 percent of the players logged into the Poker Stars site were among those competing for their share of the $500,000 prize pool and hoping to become part of history in the making with the Guinness World Record Tournament. Over $12 million in tournament winnings were paid out to Poker Stars players including the largest ever Sunday Million tournament featuring a $2.5 million guarantee, which was a million dollars more than the regular prize pool of $1.5 million. This drew a whopping 16,260 Poker Stars players into the $215 buy-in tournament forming an unheard of $3.2 million prize pool where 2,475 players took home winnings! Even the Poker Stars Sunday Warm-Up saw an increase in the $750,000 regular prize pool, as it was boosted to $1 million. This resulted in the largest-ever number of registered players totaling 5,836.
In the end, the result of the Poker Stars promotional efforts was the achievement of a new place in the Guinness Book of World Records. And just what will Poker Stars do next? Why not play at Poker Stars today and find out!
