Home / Poker News April 2011 / A look back at PokerStars’ Sunday Storm
A look back at PokerStars’ Sunday Storm
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2011-04-03 11:39
Last Sunday, PokerStars’ quarter million guaranteed was turned into the Sunday Storm. The $10 buy-in event featured a $1 million guarantee for the first time ever thus guaranteeing the eventual winner a single haul of $200k. Needless to say, the opportunity to fight for a share of a $1 million prize-pool for as little as $10 drew a huge starting field. The 113,770 players who entered the event combined buy-ins for a prize-pool that shot right past the guarantee. The winner of the event, Uvelir888, won more than $200k too: he took home $210,531.
The event attracted more than 100k players, and it thus got past a major mile-stone, becoming the second ever
online poker event which was not a freeroll to garner a starting field of more than 100 thousands players.
Such a large starting field is rather daunting, isn’t it? After all, the winner needs to survive all those throngs of contestants who are just as adamant to advance as he is. Given that it lasted a total of 11 hours and 2 minutes, the Sunday Storm saw a massive 117 players hit the rail every minute, which means that 3 players were bounced every second. Not so daunting now, is it? Such large scale events have a way of taking care of the competition in a surprisingly efficient manner.
For the winner of the event, the return on investment (ROI) was an out of this world number: in order to pocket $210,531, he only needed to invest $10. That translates into a ROI of 1,913,825%. ROI-wise, the event was arguably one of the biggest in history. By comparison, the 2010
WSOP offered Jonathan Duhamel a ROI of 89,343%, not a bad number, but nowhere near the Sunday Storm’s.
Many
PokerStars pros finished in the money in the Sunday Storm, but none of them deep enough to take down a prize of any significance. Dennis Phillips was the highest finishing pro and he only took down $56.88 for his 1,165th place.
