Now that the U.S. won’t be contributing the majority of the player pool to the Poker Stars Sunday Majors tournaments, the site is moving the times of those events to be more appealing to the new majority player base: the UK and Europe. As of this Sunday, June 5, 2011, all Sunday Majors tournaments – that’s the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up, Sunday Rebuy, Sunday Storm, Sunday Million, Sunday 500, Sunday Second Chance and Sunday Supersonic events – will be pushed ahead two hours.
That means instead of starting at 1 pm ET, the Sunday Warm-Up will start at 11 am ET. And instead of starting at 4:30 pm ET, the Sunday Million will start at 2:30 pm ET. And so on. (The only Sunday Majors event not to get rescheduled as part of these changes, incidentally, is the Sunday Kick-Off, which will retain its usual 8 pm ET time slot.)
To add a little incentive to show up for this big weekend of major changes, Poker Stars is doubling the guaranteed prize pools for each of these events. Added all together, what you get is a nearly five million dollar weekend. But the double guarantees will be for June 5 only.
PokerStars will also be running satellite tournaments into each of these tournaments all week long leading up the June 5 festivities. To help players practice getting to the tables at the right new times, PokerStars has scheduled each event’s daily satellite at the same hour as the newly scheduled time slot for its respective Sunday Majors event.
Pokerstars has finally issued an announcement to last week’s indictment and their leaving the US poker market. Several big name pros have come out and said that players should give the poker sites some time to get things worked out and that they would get their money as soon as possible.