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Early last year when I was told that we’d be hosting a $1,000,000 GTD tournament, I had mixed feelings. It was a healthy mix of excitement and sheer terror.
A $1,000,000 GTD online poker tournament in the US hadn’t even been attempted in over three years and our biggest to date had been a $215 buy-in $250,000 GTD which we had barely managed to cover.
Still, despite it being quadruple the size and over twice the buy-in of our previous biggest guaranteed tournament, it was something exciting. The words “exciting” and “online poker tournaments” hadn’t been used in the same sentence by players in the US for quite some time.
So, six months before the date of the Winning Millions Tournament we focused all our marketing efforts on its success. We offered an aggressive satellite schedule guaranteeing over 600 seats, and lived and breathed the Winning Millions tournament day and night.
The day the tournament finally arrived, things were looking good. We had qualified hundreds of players and the head count on the site was at an all-time high. All indications were that the tournament was going to be a success. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Shortly after the first card was dealt, players started experiencing severe lag and disconnects. We were the victims of some major DOSS attacks. Despite the best efforts from our software team, we were forced to cancel the tournament and refund all the buy-ins to the players.
Nevertheless, as we cancelled the tournament we rescheduled the next one and redoubled our efforts to make it happen. Our security team resolved our vulnerabilities to DOSS attacks and on February 22nd we successfully ran our first $1,000,000 GTD tournament. A total of 1,772 players participated, competing for the $200,000 first place prize money.
Encouraged by its success, we immediately scheduled our next Million Dollar Sunday and it outperformed our first with a total of 1,815 players.
And now…..onto the next. On August 2nd at 3:00 pm ET, we will hold our third Million Dollar Sunday tournament and hope the trend continues. For this one, we’re pulling out all the stops and adding more ways for our players to qualify for their seat. Each Sunday we’re guaranteeing 25 seats via our Beast and Sit & Crush satellites to the Million Dollar Sunday and we’re even offering Jackpot Poker to the Million Dollar Sunday the week before the tournament starts.
I’m proud to be associated with the only US facing network to offer $1,000,000 GTD tournaments and excited to see it happen more regularly on the site. We hope you take the time to try and qualify for your seat and come be a part of big prize pool online tournament poker coming back to the United States.
Jamie Harvey
Americas Cardroom Blog Editor
