Online Poker Tournaments Hand Out $800 Million in Prizes

Published: 08/06/2020

Online Poker Tournaments $800 Million in Prizes

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The current surge of coronavirus cases did not deter online poker tournaments to hand out hundreds of millions of prizes to players. A recent report claims that several online poker tournaments have collectively given out more than $800 million in prize money in the last three months alone.

As the coronavirus pandemic forced people to stay at home and avoid populated areas, people are turning to alternative platforms for their entertainment. One particular platform is online poker tournaments. While this nice of online gambling is already popular to its fan base, the platform has seen meteoric rise in activities over the past few months.

Traffic to online poker websites have more than doubled since governments started to impose strict lockdown rules. Records have been set and broken again in historic speed. Most importantly, prizes have reached to the roof and millions flock these platforms to play.

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The lockdown has been good for business

Many analysts agree that following the call for strict social distancing rules and lockdown protocols, people have started to look for alternative means for them to be able to gamble. Once of the safest, and perhaps most convenient alternative is through online poker platforms.

Online poker have been in operations for decades now. However, their popularity is somewhat undermined by the mainstream appeal of actual physical poker tournaments. With almost the entire world now in lockdown, the online poker industry is seeing a historic rise in growth and popularity.

Online poker platforms report that traffic have reached levels they have never seen before. As the virus forces people on lockdown, online poker platforms are now getting mainstream attention and interest.

In order to accommodate this massive influx of users, online poker platforms are staging huge tournaments with massive prizes tuning to millions of dollars.

Massive tournament prizes

One of the first to launch these huge tournaments is GGPoker. The platform launched an online WSOP Super Circuit Series with a tournament prize pool of $100 million. Rival platform PokerStars responded immediately raising its SCOOP prize pool to $135 million. Another tournament, the Powerfest series, reported that its prize pool was extended several times due to massive user influx.

These three online poker tournaments have a cumulative prize pool of more than half a billion dollars. Market experts are predicting that these prize pools will continue to grow as these platforms start to gain mainstream interests.

Aside from these huge online poker tournaments, smaller poker rooms are also receiving quite a lot of attention lately. Unibet recently reported that it had paid out more than £1 million for its Online Series of poker.

As governments around the world continue to impose lockdown orders, people will flock these online poker platforms. With tournament prizes now amounting to millions of dollars, it will no doubt catch the attention of the mainstream audience. This will further improve their popularity and fuel their growth.

The coronavirus pandemic have indeed helped fuel the growth of online poker. With no cure still available to the public, people will continue to stay at home and enjoy playing at these online platforms.