First Sunday Million Tournaments Of New Era Arrive This Weekend

From around the time people learned the name Chris Moneymaker in 2003 until that fateful day in 2011 when the United States Department of Justice seized the domains of Moneymaker’s sponsor PokerStars and a couple of its chief rivals, Sunday was the day. If you were a serious online poker player in the U.S., or even a not-so-serious one, you knew the biggest tournaments of the week were going down on Sunday.

For the last 15 years, however — yes, next Wednesday will mark 15 years since Black Friday — the Sunday online poker tournament scene in the U.S. has been greatly diminished, almost to the point of non-existence.

This coming Sunday, that momentum will be reversed. At least to a degree.

Now that PokerStars has officially become PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel and the site is, for the first time as a state-regulated entity, pooling players in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the Sunday Million — PokerStars’ signature weekly tournament, dating back 20 years — is back.

But it looks a little different than how longtime online poker enthusiasts may remember it.

Details of the new Sunday Million

The promotional page within the new app declares, “Welcome to the biggest game in town.” In this particular town, at this particular time, that’s an accurate description.

Sunday Million, however, is returning as the two biggest games in town.

It does not feature a single tournament with a $1 million guarantee. Rather, there are two events, each with its own $500,000 guaranteed prize pool, blasting off a couple of hours apart this Sunday.

The actual biggest game in town, at least in terms of the buy-in amount, is the $1,000-per-entry version of the new Sunday Million, starting at 4 p.m. ET. This tournament needs to attract at least 500 entries to avoid overlay out of Flutter Entertainment’s pockets, and as of Wednesday morning, it had 66 entrants registered. But there’s still plenty of time to enter, and up to 20 re-entries per account are permitted, for those who get eliminated and want to pony up another thousand bucks and try again.

The tournament will have 15-minute levels and is scheduled as a two-day competition, with play pausing at 1:45 a.m. ET after Sunday becomes Monday, then resuming Monday at 6 p.m.

For those PokerStars/FanDuel players for whom a $1,000 buy-in tourney is out of reach, there’s also a $100 version of the Sunday Million starting at 6 p.m. That’ll need 5,000 entries to reach its guarantee, and as of Wednesday morning, it had 1,287. All of the same parameters apply to this lower-buy-in, larger-field event: Levels are 15 minutes, players are allowed up to 20 re-entries, Day 1 ends at 1:45 a.m., and Day 2 begins Monday at 6 p.m.

One significant feature specific to the $100 event, though, is that a large portion of the field will have won its way in via satellite. Every PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel account received a complimentary $20 ticket to play in a tournament sometime during the week leading up to the new Sunday Million, with a 1-in-5 chance of earning a $100 buy-in for Sunday.

Twenty years of Sunday Millions

When the Sunday Million debuted, back on March 5, 2006, PokerStars was unregulated in the U.S. and accessible around the globe — opening up a far wider player pool than exists in its current three regulated jurisdictions in the U.S. That inaugural event had a $215 buy-in, drew 5,893 players, and featured a prize pool of a little under $1.2 million.

A year later, for the first-anniversary edition, PokerStars elevated the guarantee from $1 million to $1.5 million. The site had no trouble hitting that guarantee, with more than 10,000 players and a prize pool in excess of $2.1 million.

By 2010, the tournament had grown to the point that it gave out its first million-dollar first-place prize. And despite losing access to players in the U.S. in April 2011, a December 2011 edition for PokerStars’ 10th anniversary offered a $10 million guaranteed prize pool and surpassed it easily, reaching $12.4 million.

In 2019, PokerStars reduced the buy-in to $109, making it more accessible and, naturally, creating larger fields. And in 2020, with Covid keeping many gamblers at home, the prize pool for an anniversary tournament got above $18.6 million, from more than 93,000 entries.

This Sunday’s return will not approach that scale — hence organizers deciding they’ll need two separate tournaments to guarantee $1 million in prizes. Still, it’s a far larger poker tournament than was possible when any PokerStars tournament was limited to one ring-fenced state’s player base.

Whether there will be overlay, and whether PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel can fill tournaments like this without a massive satellite ticket promotion, remain to be seen. It’s not yet clear whether Sunday Million will become an every Sunday feature on the revamped site.

But for at least one week, Sunday is once again the big day in American online tournament poker. (And Monday will be even bigger for a handful of players who still have chips in their stacks at 1:45 a.m.)