Thursday, 28th March 2024 18:04
Home / News / New record: Biggest tournament in PokerStars live event history

Remember that time, maybe a few years ago, when one PokerStars branded online poker tournament after another would set some sort of record for the number of players involved.

2,000… 3,000… 4,000…

Part of the fun was trying to imagine what these big online tournaments would look like if they were played live. Like how big a room would you need? How many tables? What would the queue be like at registration?

Imagine.

Well, this week that exercise was made redundant by a more practical demonstration at the EPT Barcelona festival.

As you might expect, records are never set in stone. They will always find a way to get bigger.

The €1,000 Estrellas National Event has now taken that record, adding 25 per cent to the previous best and doing what formerly was only possible with a Photoshop account.

A player count, when registration finally closed, of 6,313 entries.

That’s 2,765 unique entries and 3548 re-entries.

Hats off to the Estrellas Poker Tour

To put that into perspective, if you lined up all of those tables lengthways, they’d be about a mile and a half. Or about as long as the walk from the Casino to the Sagrada Familia.

In other words enormous.

Yeah we know, they weren’t all in the same room at the same time. But ask the winner if they care when they collect a first prize of €600,000. Or any of the top 938 players who’ll share more than $6 million in prize money.

By the way if you’re interested, the previous biggest event was the Sunday Million Live back in August 2017 which managed 5,045 entries.

It also beats the previous best Estrellas Barcelona by 35 per cent. That was 4682 entries back in August 2019.

That’s a lot of numbers all round. But we thought it was worth mentioning, especially if like us, you’re currently about to travel to Barcelona for the Main Event starting on Monday. If this is any indication of what to expect, it should be big.

And with no delays at registration.

If you’re curious, here’s where all those players come from…

A breakdown of where the players came from in the record setting Estrellas Main Event

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