The Pokerstars $215 buy-in Sunday Million 9th Anniversary tournament Monday provided an American player living in Mexico with an opportunity to win some serious money, and he did just that after 15.5 hours of gruelling action and a 7-way chop at the virtual final table.
‘BRAYDEN93’, an American player who now lives in Mexico, was crowned winner of the tournament after besting a massive entry field of 50,432, claiming a main prize of $597,719.60.
That wasn’t the biggest pay-day at the final table, however; second placed Greek player kelly_koulis, who qualified through an $11 satellite, walked away with $770,000 after some shrewd wheeling and dealing in the chop that seven of the final table players agreed, which left $100,000 on the table for the winner.
Eight countries were represented at the nine-man final table, with the top eight players each pocketing a six-figure sum from a massive $10,986,400 prize pool, from which 8,397 players in all cashed.
The final heads up battle between ‘BRAYDEN93’ and kelly_koulis was a memorable one, with the chip lead changing hands several times. Although kelly_koulis started out with a substantial lead, his hard-charging opponent never gave up or let up, eventually taking the lead and ultimately winning the game and the extra cash left on the table.
This was a special tournament, celebrating the ninth anniversary of the first PokerStars Sunday Million, and the huge turnout made it the eighth richest online poker tournament of all time…bettered only by five World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) Main Events and two previous Sunday Million special anniversary tournaments.
However, in terms of the record number of players online at one time, the entry field remains dwarfed by Pokerstars’ previous Guinness Book of Records turnout for an earlier tournament, which recorded a massive 225,000 entries (see previous reports).
The other final table pay-outs looked like this:
tiltinha (Brazil) $567,978.95
PSMozak (Bulgaria) $542,539.85
sonmonedas (Argentina) $413,610.60
salalitto (Finland) $394,207.12
ModzillaPL (Canada) $336,550.72
bari_nikolov (Bulgaria) $119,523.84
kokli_1 (Czech Republic) $87,247.36