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Readers Choice Awards
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Best Poker Tournaments: PokerStars
When it comes to the poker industry’s leading lights in the field of tournaments, they certainly don’t come much brighter than PokerStars.
As would befit the world’s largest poker operator, PokerStars offers an unparalleled range of single and multi-table tournaments to suit all budgets and levels of player – and their regular guaranteed tournaments are undoubtedly some of the best available anywhere on the net.
Naturally at the top of the pile is the PokerStars.com Sunday Million which, despite what the name would have you believe, now offers players the chance to win their share of a whopping $1.5 million – the biggest guaranteed prize pool of any regular tournament on the web – every single week.
With the winner usually pocketing somewhere in the region of $250,000, the Sunday Million attracts fields containing upwards of 8,000 runners and regularly includes some of the biggest names in online poker. However, the action doesn’t stop there on a Sunday as PokerStars also offers the $750,000 guaranteed Sunday Warm-Up, the Sunday 1/4 Million and the Sunday $500k in a bumper day of tournament action.
For those who can’t wait until the weekend to take their shot at winning life-changing amounts of money, the Daily Eighty Grand operates like clockwork, every day at ET 15.00 for a buy-in of just $55 and is followed shortly after by the nightly $100 Rebuy boasting a guaranteed prize pool of $60,000.
However, in spite of all the value-added tournaments that PokerStars has to offer, any serious online poker player will tell you that it’s a site’s range of sit-and-gos which comprise the bread-and-butter of their daily offering – and PokerStars certainly have that base covered with a truly comprehensive selection of games.
From heads-up games to nine-handed tables, no limit Hold’em to pot limit Omaha and micro-stakes buy-ins all the way up to the nosebleeds, PokerStars have a table to suit every players individuals needs and requirements, and it is this unrivalled variety that truly marks them out from the competition in a tightly contested market.
Such is PokerStars reputation in the field of online tournaments that the site recently managed to break their own world record for hosting the largest ever online poker tournament as a staggering 149,196 players all took their seats in a $1 MTT – if that alone doesn’t make them worthy of receiving this reward, we don’t know what does.
Hall of Fame Award: PokerStars
The Gambling Insider Hall of Fame award was conceived to honour the true industry titans who have consistently over-performed in their respective fields for many years, so who better to pick up this year’s prize than the world biggest – and arguably best – poker site, PokerStars.com.
As a name, PokerStars stands tall in the highly competitive arena of online poker and has long been synonymous with tournament excellence both live and online. Already the most extensive and best-visited poker client on the web, Stars have continued to improve and expand in another breakthrough year in 2009.
The past twelve months have seen Stars take several giant leaps forward in the world of online poker, perhaps most notably when they made the world’s biggest Sunday tournament even bigger by increasing the guaranteed prize pool for the PokerStars.com Sunday Million to an incredible $1.5 million.
Even now, the tournament is over-subscribed and breaches its already vast guarantee virtually every week, with winners almost certain to take away a first prize in excess of a quarter-of-a-million dollars. With such huge rewards on offer, the Sunday Million has consistently attracted the biggest names in online poker, with the likes of Yevgeniy “JovialGent” Timoshenko, Kevin “BeLOWaBOVe” Saul and Eric “Rizen” Lynch all pounding the PokerStars virtual felt every Sunday night.
The past year has also seen PokerStars introduce a brand new online poker series to accompany their industry-leading World Championship of Online Poker event. The Spring Championship of Online Poker – or SCOOP as it is better known – made its debut last April and proved a rip-roaring success, giving away over $40,000,000 in prize money across 22 unique events. What’s more, with each event featuring buy-ins to suit all wallet types, even the most under-rolled of players could take their shot at winning a life-changing pay-out without the need for satellite qualification.
Of course, the popularity of the new SCOOP series was mirrored in Stars flagship online series, WCOOP, as the 2009 event smashed records across the board in its seventh full season. Officially the biggest online series ever held, last year’s WCOOP saw a staggering $51,652,800 given away across 45 events, with no fewer than 43,973 unique players from 140 countries around the world all competing. Naturally, PokerStars held down their end with the success of Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, who bagged himself two bracelets in separate Hold’em events.
On the live front, 2009 was also a year of massive growth for PokerStars ever-expanding network of bricks-and-mortar series’, with Russian, Czech-Slovak, Italian and UK tours all added to their tournament roster. Such widespread development throughout Europe has seen poker’s popularity soar on the continent in the past twelve months and, once again, the company have been at the forefront of their industry in nurturing an emerging and increasingly lucrative poker market.
With so much accomplished over the previous year alone, PokerStars.com are fully-deserving of their Hall of Fame award and one can only expect further great things to follow for the online poker giants in 2010.
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