PokerStars Sunday Majors pay out $290,000

Sunday, 25 January 2009

The “Warm-Up” is quite an innocuous name for a $216 tournament that guarantees a $1,000,000 prize pool, we think. True, it does pale in comparison to the Sunday Million which has in previous weeks climbed as high as a $3m+ pool, but still – the Warm-Up is not to be sniffed at.

The final hand of the Warm-Up came shortly after IM CRU and SpaceyFCB had fought through a field of over 4,000 players to come to the heads-up stage. No deal had been struck so they were playing for the original prizes - $75,240 for second and a nice $107,844 for first place.

IM CRU raised pre-flop with KT and SpaceyFCB called. The flop was a raggy K32 and unsurprisingly both players bet furiously, eventually getting all the money in the middle. IM CRU had a legitimate hand with top pair, top kicker but SpaceyFCB was on the good end of a PokerStars cooler, holding 22 for a flopped set that held up.

In the Sunday Million, LosChief and Birdstone44 reached the heads-up stage and decided to look at a deal. Their chip counts looked like this:

Seat 5: LosChief (45,895,796 in chips)
Seat 6: Birdstone44 (36,704,204 in chips)

Eventually they decided to split near-evenly, $151k for Birdstone44 and $153k for LosChief. $30,000 was reserved for the winner, which was decided after LosChief ground down Birdstone44’s stack with relentless aggression until he was forced to move his last $13m in with KJ. LosChief made the call with K5cc and hit his three-outer on the turn to take $183k in total.



Tags: Poker News, PokerStars, Sunday, Majors, pay, out, $290, 000