Pokerstars Sets Record For Largest Poker Tournament

On the December 27th, 2009, Pokerstars set a new Guinness World Record for the number of players in a poker tournament. The old record, which they also held, was 65,000 players. The new record is 149,196, a massive 230% increase. The winner of the event was oskar69, who took home $50,000. The tournament had an overlay of roughly $150,000 as I estimated in my preview post about Pokerstars attempt to host the largest poker tournament a few days ago.

Poker Star’s arch-rival Full Tilt Poker will be hard pressed to beat this record anytime soon. I don’t have the exact number but at one point there were around 450,000 players logged in at Pokerstars during the tournament, definitely something to be proud of by itself.

The  most surprising aspect of this tournament is that it only took around 6 hours to complete. I’ve seen tournaments with playing fields 5-10% of this one take twice as long.

In any event though I’m sure this record will be broken, by Poker Stars, in 2010. Online poker has been booming so I’m sure we’ll be playing in “1 million seat” tournaments before long.