A 19-year-old university student from Canada won $100,000 on PokerStars Saturday playing in a six-handed 1¢-2¢ table. Justine Hall, who is waiting tables for the summer, is the winner of PokerStars.com's Big 10 Billion Celebration promotion. By winning the 10 billionth hand dealt on PokerStars, she won $100,000.
Hall, who plays under the name "justine0003," had $0.80 at the start of the hand. She was in the big blind, when the game was paused and an employee of PokerStars came on and wrote in the chat box:
"Welcome to the biggest hand of 1 cent 2 cent ever."
When action continued, Rechargeable went all in for $4.83, the second player to act, inwooke, then folded. That player had $1.73 in front of him (her?) at the start of the hand. The_Moog, the chip leader with $6.43, pushed all in, which apparently was enough to drive XtedForrestX from the hand (the player saved his $2.95). Ferius called his or her last $3.09 and so did Hall.
The board came A
K T
9 8
, giving Hall the flush with 8 3 and a pot worth $100,003.23.
The two players that folded passed still won $10,000, which is what the five players who were at the table won for being at the table. At the time, Hall had $12 in her PokerStars account.
"It was a total fluke," Hall told PokerStars. "I didn't even realize that it was the major big hand right away. I thought it was just another one leading up to it."
Hall says she'll pay for her education with the money, but will also set a little aside for shopping.
PokerStars is the first online poker site to reach 10 billion hands. It took the site more than five years to reach 5 billion hands, which it did last summer., and less than a year to get to this point.
PokerStars gave away prizes to 100 "milestone" hands, and depending on what limits the players were playing in, they won between $100 and $2,000. Those rules applied to all the hands except for the 10 billionth hand, which just happened to be dealt on a micro-limit table.
