Home / Poker News July 2009 / Online poker war: Full Tilt vs PokerStars
Online poker war: Full Tilt vs PokerStars
Posted by: James Carter. - Thu, 2009-07-23 15:56
For a good few years now, we in the poker industry have been referring to Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars as two industry giants, the biggest and best online poker sites out there. Which one of them is bigger though? Although most of us had a gut feeling that PokerStars could whoop Full Tilt popularity-wise, there was never any evidence such claims could be substantiated by. Now we have the evidence and yes, PokerStars is still tops, although the bout was in fact decided by a technicality.
The two online poker giants squared off in a battle of MTTs, the goal being to blow away the record set for MTT participation by PokerStars. The event which held the previous record was a $11 buy-in one, which attracted 35,000 players.
The gauntlet was thrown down when Full Tilt poker decided to give a twist to its “Five” promotion, by hosting a massive MTT with the goal to break PokerStars’ attendance record.
Full Tilt’s record attempt was meant to crown the site’s 5th birthday celebrations, but it wasn’t an entirely fair approach to begin with.
While PokerStars’ record setting tournament featured $11 buy-ins, Full Tilt’s event featured $5 buy-ins, lavish overlays and a 50k player cap. The fact alone that the buy-in wasn’t even half that of the PokerStars event, should’ve annulled the record attempt right away.
PokerStars’ response was prompt though. They resorted to the same tactics that Full Tilt adopted in their record tournament and announced a Guinness World Record attempt, one with a $1 buy-in and without an official player cap initially. Later, the cap was set to 65,000 and that, combined with the extremely accessible buy-in, pretty much settled the issue in favor of PokerStars.
Guilty of initially upping the stakes, or lowering the buy-in rather, Full Tilt got fed a dose of its own medicine. Failing to remove the 50,000 player cap, Full Tilt conceded defeat, as both tournaments sold out extremely quickly.
Whenever giants bicker, the dwarves pick up the tasty morsels falling off the table, and such was the case in this instance as well. The competition for the world record had generated some quite unprecedented value for players.
The prize-pools were giant in comparison to the buy-ins, and there were a bunch of ultra cheap satellites leading up to each event. On top of that, players could buy into Full Tilt’s tourney with player points and there was a lot of extra money shoved into the prize-pool by both sites.
Full Tilt added $250,000 as an incentive, thus creating a $500,000 total prize pool. Pokerstars added $65,000, to round the pool up to $130,000.
Thus it happened that player “004 license” took home $13,000 on his initial $1 investment at PokerStars, and player “breo 40” pocketed a massive $45,000 on an initial investment of $5.
Now the only question on players’ mind is: when will we see round two of this heavy-weight battle commence?
