Joined: Apr '11
Location: Romania
Age: 58 (M)
Posts: 2432
The Guinness Book of World Records has formally recognised PokerStars' recent mega tournament as the largest ever.
Marking the conclusion of their 100 Billion Hands celebrations, the $1 tournament offered players a $300,000 guarantee and attracted a staggering 225,000 players.
Following the conclusion of the tournament in which Russia's "Mr.SlavoPro" won the top prize of $25,000, Guinness World Records carried out their official verification process.
After checking the facts and figures the event was finally approved earlier today and now stands at the largest poker tournament in history.
Joined: May '08
Location: Lithuania
Age: 39 (M)
Posts: 10090
hahahahha really doubt that dudes from Guinness World Records company checked the situation in detail: they didn't take into account all those bots stars managed to squeeze in just to inflate the numbers... i will remember this tourney for one thing: u can just late reg & get ~$6 without even playing...wish there were more of this type of tourneys
Joined: Mar '09
Location: Greece
Age: 47 (F)
Posts: 14136
No matter what, it was a "sponsored" entry by Poker Stars. If they had kept their original entry requirements for the tournament they would have unfilled spots. But as you mentioned here they were practically giving away tickets for nothing.
Joined: Sep '12
Location: Romania
Age: 33 (M)
Posts: 1052
I think more than 50% of players was in sit out or was some bots for that record... Anyway not even 10% don't pay that buy-in, was free from deposit or from some freerolls... A world record will be when any player will pay buy-in and play live, like WSOP or something like that not freeroll...
Joined: Jan '11
Location: United States
Age: 60 (M)
Posts: 3361
I really don't care a lot about the stats, but was the prior record made back when U.S. players were allowed to play? Just curious because I do find it hard to believe that there were that many entraints without there being any U.S. players involved. I believe there's a lot of starving poker players here in the U.S.
Joined: Apr '11
Location: Romania
Age: 35 (M)
Posts: 6669
To be honest i'm not such a big fan of these huge tournaments, the reason is pretty simple: poker skills on these type of tournaments is less important than luck!
Still, a record it's a record for sure, maybe they can throw in another promo
Joined: Feb '12
Location: Canada
Age: 64 (M)
Posts: 6036
I'm not so inclined to think the thing was full of bots... But there was certainly a lot of sitter's out...
Lots of folks who got signed up but never played...
I guess technically, it was about how many 'entrants' there were, and not so much about how many people actually played the thing... Guiness would just look at the list of entrants I'm sure,...they don't really have any way to go through the entire list and actually see who was playing...
Joined: Mar '09
Location: Greece
Age: 47 (F)
Posts: 14136
Just checked the Guinness page and indeed they still have the old record up. So i searched for poker related records, and i got the result for most tables played at once, in 1 hour. 62 tables from Elky. Thats a simply wow.
