A poker tournament that previously broke the Guinness World Record for largest guaranteed pot size returns in January – and will make its winner a millionaire.
The Venom event, hosted by Americas Cardroom, attracted global headlines back in 2019 when it offered up a guaranteed bounty of $5 million – around £3.7 million.
And this time, the stakes are metaphorically and literally higher, with a total prize fund of $10 million (£7.5 million) on the table.
The action gets underway on January 21, with starting events every Sunday and Friday until the end of the month. The tournament’s second official day will kick in on January 31, with a third day’s play on February 1 before a winner is crowned on the second of the month.
You can qualify for your own attempt at the million dollar prize in a number of ways – many of which feature Americas Cardroom’s unique game modes, if you haven’t sampled those already.
The Blitz Satellite events are so fast that players that fold their hand are immediately given a new set of cards to play, while a number of the buy-in events will incorporate the brand’s innovative Staking feature – here, you can buy into another player’s hand, or even sell your own hand of cards to the highest bidder.
You can try to qualify via the nine-tiered Skip and Step tournaments, which are free to play and reward the most consistent players with a seat at the Venom table.
There’s the daily Venom Fever satellites too, which will run almost every day from January 2 to the end of the month, with as many as 750 seats at the final Venom table available.
Of course, if you can’t be bothered with that rigmarole, you can simply thrust your way into the Venom tournament with a $2,650 (£1,975) buy in.
All of the salient details you need can be found on the Americas Cardroom website.
Online Poker World Records
The record previously held by the Venom event is just one of a number of eye-popping landmarks set in poker.
The Americas Cardroom tournament was subsequently beaten as the biggest prize pool by the WSOP online event in August 2020. A staggering $27.5 million, or £20.6 million, was accrued between the 5,800 players.
And that led to another confirmed record: the lucky winner of that $5k Main Event, Stoyan Madanzhiev, trousered nearly $4 million – the largest online poker payout in history.
Officially confirmed by the Guinness World Records administrators, the largest single pot ever played for in a poker tournament was the mammoth $4.5 million (£3.3 million) on the table between Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson and T.J. Cloutier at the World Series of Poker back in 2000.
There has only ever been one $1 million pot won in a televised poker event, and that came on English soil. Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan locked horns in Full Tilt Poker’s Million Dollar Cash Game, hosted in London back in 2009. Dwan won with a 3-4-5-6-7 straight….Ivey had picked up A-2-3-4-5.
And the largest guaranteed first prize of a poker tournament came at Wembley Stadium back in 2013. The International Stadium Poker Tour served up a $1.4 million – £850k – top prize to the victor of their roadshow event.