Poker Maximus Doing Well Early

by Mario Alfonsi  |  Published on Mar 6, 2012  |  Updated on Mar 6, 2012

This past Sunday marked the beginning of Merge Gaming’s tournament series known as Poker Maximus. The series is being played across all of the different online poker skins owned and operated by Merge, most notably Lock Poker and Carbon Poker. The tournament series is running the whole month of March and offers guaranteed tournaments of every shape and size. Day 1 on Sunday was considered to be such a huge success because all 4 of the opening day’s events easily surpassed the guaranteed prizepools.The first event, a Hold’em tournament with a guaranteed prizepool of $7,500 saw that number squashed thanks to over 5,000 entries. The $7,500 prizepool was boosted up to over $50,000 which means players got their money’s worth for a tournament that had a total buy-in of only $11. Nicky Evans, who is part of Lock Poker’s LockPRO Elite squad finished in 10^th place in this event.The second event on Sunday led to the second time that a guarantee was surpassed by a large margin. The $109 buy-in 2^nd event was a tournament with a guarantee of $150,000; not a small prizepool at all. But thanks to a huge number of entrants, the prizepool was bumped up to over $230,000 and the first place prize was nearly $40,000. A total of 2,361 players registered for the second event and already it was clear that Poker Maximus is very popular amongst the players.Event 3 was a $15,000 guaranteed tournament with a buy-in that totaled only $33. The overall prizepool grew to five times the guaranteed amount as it almost eclipsed the $80,000 mark. The first place prize, which was just over $13,000 was almost as much as the original guarantee for the entire prizepool. As trends would suggest, the 4^th event on the day also shattered its $75,000 guarantee leaving the people at Merge quite pleased.For the rest of the month Poker Maximus will be shattering expectations and giving players huge payouts. Because Merge is one of the few remaining networks available for US players, everyone is flocking to this event. Check out Merge sites like Lock Poker and Carbon Poker for more information on all the events during Poker Maximus.