PokerStars 10th Anniversary Sunday Million - First-Eagle wins $1.14m first prize

PokerStars, the world's largest poker site, celebrated it's 10th birthday in style with months of promotions, culminating in last night's $10m Guaranteed Sunday Million.

62116 players stumped up the $215 buy-in for a shot at the biggest guarantee in online poker history and the $2 million guaranteed first prize. With such a big field the guarantee was broken and the total prize pool split between the 7682 players to be paid reached a staggering $12,423,200.

Players could enter for much less than the full buy in as PokerStars ran thousands of satellites where players could win seats, including a remarkable $11 tournament with a thousand seats guaranteed for the big one. Unfortunately, after final tabling two $2 turbo satellites, the author was unable to qualify for the main event (losing one hand to a two outer on the river!).

The tournament kicked off at 1930 GMT on Sunday 18th December and didn't finish until late on Monday morning. Two players in the final nine were from Australia and it is perhaps surprising that their relative lack of fatigue didn't see one of them win (they both still claimed huge six-figure prizes).

As the biggest Sunday Million ever came to a conclusion the final six-players decided to do a deal and leave $200,000 extra for the winner. Chip leader at the time the deal was done "Dimedroll" from Russia was awarded $995,996.85 for getting that far, meaning that the eventual winner would get less than the $2m guaranteed for the win, which is allowed when all players agree to make a deal.

The aggressive Russian eventually went out in fifth place but was still the second-best paid player in the whole tournament, not bad for around 16 hours work and $215 investment.

After the deal was agreed the remaining players played with less caution as they were all guaranteed to win some of the biggest amounts ever in an online tournament. As heads-up play was reached the remaining players were "First-Eagle" from Canada and "Unstoffable" from Spain. The Canadian player eventually prevailed and with the extra $200,000 for coming first he became a dollar-millionaire, with a prize of $1,146,574.65 going straight into his PokerStars account. The Spanish player was short-stack when the deal was made and won $580,724.34.

The identity of the winner is Kyle Weir, a pro from the United States who relocated to Canada after Black Friday.

PokerStars 10th Anniversary Sunday Million ($10m GTD) Final Table Payouts

1. First-Eagle (Canada) - *$1,146,574.65
2. Unstoffable (Spain) - *$580,724.34
3. BLAABAR (Sweden) - *$709,896.78
4. tunafish919 (Australia) - *$627,317.26
5. Dimedroll (Russia) - *$995,996.85
6. SkunkDen (Australia) - *$758,986.42
7. fireballdio (Portugal) - $182,406.00
8. kaalen (Sweden) - $119,866.80
9. yokouno1980 (Israel) - $86,512.56

* Denotes six handed deal