February 2016: The Online Poker website PokerStars hosted an Online Poker Tournament on October 5th, 2015. It has now entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest online poker tournament ever to be hosted, with 253,692 people who played. This number has surpassed the total population of small countries like Samoa, San Marino, and Tonga.
This isn’t the first time PokerStars has made this record, though. They have done it once before, in 2008, when more than 35,000 players registered for their $11 event. From that to more than a quarter of a million players in seven years is a commendable feat. There was a micro-stakes series with less than $1 buy-ins and massive payouts as one of the formats.
Owing to this, thousands of players registered on the site days before the tournament was scheduled to kick off. As ambitious as it was, PokerStars had not planned every little detail of this magnanimous event but left it to the players. From the looks of it, they got truly lucky.
