Mark Herm Wins PokerStars Sunday Million
It was a long and fortuitous weekend for online poker players, including some well known poker pros, as the biggest online poker tournaments brought sizeable profits to their wallets. A multitude of poker pros finished deep in the money at the largest online poker tournaments of the holiday weekend.
Poker pro Mark Herm was the highest winner overall, taking down the PokerStars Sunday Million for an impressive $230k. With a buy-in of $215 and guaranteed prize pool of $1.5 million, PokerStars received 7,661 entries to the Sunday Million, boosting the expected prize pool by an additional $32,000.
In the end, Mark Herm would outlast e1mdopp in heads-up play to take down the 1st place prize. The second place victor pocketed $168,542, while third place finisher, Yourmybread, collected an equally appreciable $114,915. Poker pro Jason DeWitt cashed with a 16th place finish worth $4,000.
The PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up would also realize a 1st place winner in the 6-digit prize range. Due to a 3-way deal at the final table, the top three finishers each received near enough to $100,000. Coming in first place was el-rage, clinching $120,194. The second place prize of $92k went to upay4mytreez while third place finisher diphazz took home $97k, a higher prize than second thanks to the prior deal making.
The big weekender at Full Tilt Poker continued to see a disappointing number of entries as the $750k GTD drew a moderate crowd of only 3,272 players. With a $200 buy-in, that would only cover $654,400 of the guaranteed prize, forcing Full Tilt to fork over the remaining $95,600.
That didn’t bother Fredrickjame in the least, however, as he whittled his way through the field to take the crown, along with the online poker room’s only 6-figure winner of the weekend at $132k. No deals were struck in this event, delivering a standard second place prize of $80k to HGC_1. Several big name poker players would finish further down the line, including Frank Calo in third position for $52k, followed by Andres Pereyra in 16th place and Mark Zajdner in 23rd.
That about rounds out the best online poker winners for the weekend. No other online poker rooms reported anyone taking home a 6-digit reward for their online poker tournament efforts.
Currently PokerStars is the only poker room seeing enough action on a regular basis to extend the guaranteed prize pools in its biggest events. This is highly attributed to two distinguishing factors, one being the heavy influx of sports bettors during the World Cup as well as the kickoff of the NFL season and MLB playoffs, and the other being a continued decline in US player activity due to current economical issues across in the United States.