Welcome to Day 1 of the Stadium Series Freezeout Grand Final - High: $5,200 NLHE
The 2020 PokerStars Stadium Series has wrapped almost four weeks of poker action but it all culminates in the three Grand Finals which come in the usual Low, Medium and High Tiers. Flagship event of the first-ever festival of its kind with guaranteed prize pools of $50 million is the Freezeout Grand Final - High: $5,200 NLHE, which comes with an impressive guarantee of $5,000,000 itself and gets underway as of 1.05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST).
Stadium Series tournaments ran every day from July 5th, 2020, until August 2nd, 2020 and included the daily Heats which awarded free tickets to the coveted weekly Stadium Series Sunday Finals to the top finishers. All players that reached the final tables in these previous Sunday Finals received a $5,200 ticket to the Grand Final courtesy of PokerStars and can take a shot at the seven-figure prize pool.
The Grand Final offers no re-entry option and all participants have just one shot at glory with a starting stack of 250,000 and blinds kicking off at 600-1,200 with a running ante of 150. Each level lasts 20 minutes each and the late registration remains open for six hours and five minutes for all those that wish to buy in. There were 10 MTT satellites on the final day of the festival to give poker enthusiasts the chance to win their seat for a fraction of the buy-in and more than 400 contenders were registered in the early morning hours.
The three winners of the Sunday Finals High tier were Michael "munchenHB" Telker, Alisson "heyalisson" Piekazewicz and Parker "tonkaaaa" Talbot, who will all be back for more high stakes action as of today.
Furthermore, the PokerStars ambassadors and Lex "L. Veldhuis" Veldhuis, Ben "Spraggy" Spragg and Fintan "EasyWithAces" Hand all had a successful campaign on the virtual felt and streamed the deep runs on their own Twitch channels. Veldhuis came out on top in the Stadium Series Heat 16-H: $2,100 NLHE. Hand reached several final days and topped it all with a third-place finish in Stadium Series Heat 18-H: $2,100 NLHE for $57,299.20 and bubbled the final table in Stadium Series Heat 25-H: $5,200 NLHE. In the very same tournament, Spragg made it to the podium and finished third behind Mikita "fish2013" Badziakouski and Christian "WATnlos" Rudolph for a payday of $70,633.50.
The final table run of Spragg attracted more than 30,000 viewers at the same time on Twitch and left the Brit "speechless".
A little over 4 years ago, I started streaming 2c/5c cash games to an audience of around 10 people.
— Spraggy (@spraggy)
PokerStars has also hosted streams of the Stadium Series tournaments on their Twitch channel with commentary by Joe Stapleton and James Hartigan, and they will do so again for the Grand Final with cards-up coverage on a delay of at least 30 minutes.
Who will claim the first-ever Stadium Series Grand Final title, the bragging rights and a big payday? How will the streamers fare in their attempt for more glory? Day 1 concludes once the money bubble has burst and tournament will be played throughout three days until Tuesday, August 4th, 2020. All PokerNews updates for the entire duration of the event will be published on the same 30-minute delay in order to not spoil any of the action for spectators who follow the live stream.