Online Poker Sunday Recap: Overlays, Powerfest and High Stakes

Hosting a guaranteed $10 million tournament on the same day that Party Poker concluded its Powerfest series with Main Events resulted in a $1.2 million overlay in the PokerStars Sunday Million 12th Anniversary special event.

That's a lot of dough. Or maybe it's a lot of D'oh!

It was also Super Bowl Sunday, and while the football game is mostly an American event and Americans can't play at PokerStars anyway, I would venture to guess that at least a few rest-of-world poker players passed on the Sunday Million in order to watch Tom Brady and the Patriots lose.

The $215 buy-in for the Anniversary Sunday Million was the same as always. The event drew 34,274 entries and 9,701 re-entries, creating a prize pool of almost $8.8 million.

Ten milly guaranteeds were hosted by 'Stars the last two years to commemorate the Sunday Million anniversary and both eclipsed the guarantee. A winner for this year will emerge on Monday, Feb. 5.

Overlay Sunday Part Deux

Back to my Super Bowl Sunday argument and its effect on online poker, US-friendly WPN has been running Million Dollar Sunday tournaments the last three weeks and the player turnout on Super Bowl Sunday was the lowest of the three thus far. A $265 buy-in attracted 3,256 entrants and built a prize pool of $814,000 - another nice overlay.

Or perhaps players avoided WPN due to Joey Ingram's recently released YouTube video detailing his belief regarding collusion, multi-accounting, widespread botting, and even God-mode type cheating at Americas Cardroom. Those are some strong and serious accusations and we likely haven't heard the last on that subject.

Powerfest

Two Powerfest events offered prize pools in excess of $1 million on Sunday Feb. 4th and Party Poker Team Pro Patrick Leonard won one of them. Leonard's take was $207,978 in the $5,200 buy-in $1M GTD that consisted of 204 entrants and a $1,020,000 prize pool.

It was "letsgodancing" who topped a field of 525 entries in the Powerfest $1M GTD Main Event and who is likely doing plenty of dancing today. The title was worth $195,720 after the entrants each bought in for $2,100, surpassing the guarantee by $50,000.

High Stakes Cash Games

The Super Bowl and huge tournaments at Party Poker and PokerStars didn't stop Alexander "joiso" Kostritsyn and Elior "Crazy Elior" Sion from duking it out playing cash games for big money on Sunday. According to HighStakes DB, Kostritsyn took Sion for more than $215,000.

The site was PokerStars $400/$800 8-Game tables for an appetizer of 68 hands where joiso booked a win of $29,152. A 15-minute interlude was followed by a return to higher stakes of $1k/$2k, with the pair going at it for more than two hours.

Some 268 hands later, Kostritsyn was up another $185,513, bringing his total profit for the two Sunday sessions to $215,740. The Russian is one of the world's top high stakes mixed game pros and the weekend results at PokerStars certainly didn't blemish that status.