More than 85,000 players showed up on Day 1 of the PokerStars Sunday Million 14th Anniversary event.

Sunday was a massive day for online poker with turnouts in tournaments across all sites seeing extraordinary growth. When PokerStars chose March 15 as the date for its 14th Anniversary Sunday Million event, they had no idea that real world events would bring so many players back to the online tables.

The $12.5 million guarantee already meant that this event would be the single largest prize pool in PokerStars 19-year history, but it took just under three hours to draw the 62,500 required players that ensured PokerStars wouldn’t be out of pocket. Over the next four hours of play, a grand total of 85,432 entries pushed the total prize pool to $17,086,400. The only two events in the history of online poker with bigger prize pools were the 2018 and 2019 partypoker MILLIONS Online, both of which eclipsed $21,000,000.

Late registration in the Sunday Million remains open until the start of Day 2 at 1 PM ET but they have no chance at breaking the record. The 107,000 player cap means the maximum possible prize pool for this event is $21,400,000, which would put it one spot behind the 2018 partypoker MILLIONS Online event and just ahead of last December’s MILLIONS Online.

Largest Online Poker Tournament Prize Pools

DATE EVENT BUY-IN PRIZE POOL
December 6, 2018 partypoker MILLIONS Online $5,300 $21,780,000
December 11, 2019 partypoker MILLIONS Online $10,300 $21,090,000
March 22, 2020 Sunday Million 14th Anniversary $215 TBD
December 18, 2011 Sunday Million 10th Anniversary $215 $12,423,200
April 14, 2019 Sunday Million 13th Anniversary $215 $12,268,400
September 26, 2010 WCOOP Main Event $5,200 $12,215,000
March 6, 2011 Sunday Million 5th Anniversary $215 $11,825,600
April 22, 2018 Sunday Million Anniversary: Take 2 $215 $11,262,000
September 26, 2019 WCOOP Main Event $5,200 $11,180,000
April 2, 2017 Sunday Million 11th Anniversary $215 $11,167,000

Just 16,836 players advanced through the 18 levels of play on Day 1. China’s ‘nowwor880‘ ended up with the chip lead after accumulating 680,117 chips. Not far behind them is Belgium’s ‘X_QQ_AA_KK_fish‘ with 643,093. Rounding out the top three was ‘DLSXL‘ with 576,980.

Top 10 Chip Counts

  1. nowwor880 – 680,117
  2. X_QQ_AA_KK_fish – 643,093
  3. DLSXL – 576,980
  4. GLiTCHy M-F – 565,242
  5. flyflo – 545,887
  6. guiantonio2 – 530,381
  7. nakolene888 – 529,102
  8. IownYoUlolz – 513,879
  9. ChrizCrozz – 501,481
  10. CharlyBigPot – 499,343

Some of the notables to advance to Day 2 of the three-day event include former #1-ranked ‘eisenhower1‘ (413,982), Anatoly ‘NL_Profit’ Filatov (384,476), Antoine ‘A.Saout’ Saout (357,942), Patrick ‘pads1161’ Leonard (110,532), Pedro ‘pvigar’ Garagnani (105,908), Conor ‘1_conor_b_1’ Beresford (97,661), Alex ‘bigfox86’ Foxen (85,166), Kristen ‘krissyb24’ Bicknell (43,897), current #2-ranked Johannes ‘Greenstone’ Korsar (34,050), and ‘cocojamb0‘ (20,000).

Current #1 ‘Lena900‘ also advanced to Day 2 with 87,603.

The average stack is 101,719. Play resumes at 1 PM ET on Monday and will play 32 15-minute levels.