PokerStars’ December Festival has wrapped up and to put a bow on the final days of 2014, the world’s largest poker room hosted one of the world’s largest poker tournaments, a special $5 million guaranteed Sunday Million. The Sunday Million is normally an extremely popular weekly tourney, but its guarantee is usually “only” $1 million. For the same $215 buy-in, though, players this past Sunday could play for five times that amount.
As it turned out, the guarantee worked out swimmingly for PokerStars, as it attracted 31,439 players, generating a prize pool of $6,287,800. Norway’s “TrondheimAAA” won the $489,130.83 first prize after a 14 hour marathon. To give an idea of the pace of the tournament, after five hours, the field had been cut to around 5,300 players and after another five, it was down to just 100. At twelve hours, there were only 18 players left and TrondeheimAAA was on top. He was also the overwhelming chip leader when the nine-handed final table began, holding 103.6 million chips; his closest competitor had just 50.2 million.
A bit after the field was narrowed to six, the players paused the action to discuss a chop. As the PokerStarsBlog.com described it, “TrondheimAAA was still the overwhelming leader with nearly 125 million, Zarmil was next with about 57 million, and the other four were all in the 27-37 million range. Both “chip chop” and ICM-based figures were presented — in each case leaving $50,000 for which to play — and working from the ICM numbers a few tweaks were made and a deal was agreed upon.”
To explain some of the lingo there, a “chip chop” is a deal in which the payouts are determined solely based on the number of chips each person holds. It is easy to understand and calculate, but the problem is that if one player has a humongous lead, the numbers often result in him being awarded more money in a chop than he would have won for the normal first prize. At the same time, the player at the bottom of the chip chop might be given less than the payout for the next player to be eliminated. Not really fair, and this may have been the situation in this tourney. ICM stands for “Independent Chip Model” and involves some fancy calculations to essentially determine the chances of each player winning based on their chips stacks and comes up with a cash value for each. It is often not as favorable for the chip leader, but better for the smaller stacks.
In this Sunday Million, it looks like the six players used the ICM method, adjusted a few things (as often happens), and then reserved $50,000 in which to play for so that there was still motivation to win. In the end, TrondheimAAA did end up taking the crown along with nearly half a million dollars.
Here is a breakdown of the final table payouts; asterisks denote amounts that were determined from the six-way deal.
1. TrondheimAAA — $489,130.83*
2. straßenjupp — $268,725.21*
3. Zarmil — $325,775.16*
4. Tiago “tgassen” Gassen — $265,743.51*
5. EVITS_AK — $275,802.74*
6. manipulatoor — $241,074.70*
7. alwaysdegen — $96,014.70
8. Ivan Barros — $71,177.89
9. Aditya “Donkab0mber” Sushant — $52,754.64
