The regular weekend, big-money tournaments continued to flourish this week with the organising online poker rooms all meeting their participation targets, thus ensuring that the guaranteed prize pools were reached.
In the Poker Stars.com $1 Million Guaranteed weekly event this popular site (it’s the second biggest on the Internet) welcomed a little shy of 6 000 hot-to-trot pokerheads, easily overtaking their guaranteed $1 million in prizes. One of the longest running of all the regular big prize tournaments the competition developed plenty of action as the contestants were whittled down to a final table with solid rewards.
The final results looked like this:
CardXFactor (a Californian from Stockton) won the event and took home $158 889. Second spot and a cheque for $72 997 went to a Danish player using the online ‘handle’ N00Z and the rest of the table were all in the five figure bracket with even the tail-end Charlie collecting $10 657.80. Players hailed mainly from the USA, but Canada, Venezuela, Denmark and even Estonia were represented.
Full Tilt Poker‘s $400 000 Guaranteed was the last in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) and delivered all the action that players anticipated. 1 468 players paid the $500+$35 entry fee and pushed the prizepool to $734 000, almost double the guarantee.
With a mixture of players from all over the world the play was intense and exciting, leading to a final table and some heavy wagering before player ‘Phatigue’ truimphed and snared the $161 480 top prize. ‘Crownginger’ pulled in $70 427 for second place and even the first player eliminated from the final, ‘Timkrank’ picked up $11 010.
Over at the Party Poker Sunday Million Guaranteed, the entries, at 5 232 were lower than those achieved at rival Poker Stars but nevertheless pushed the guaranteed prize pool well ahead of the base number. The winner, ‘da_icestro’ from Philadelphia in the States was paid $162 192 for his trouble after a heads up with second placed ‘andrewkole’ whose paycheck was a hefty $88 525.