Greenstein and Moneymaker top biggest ever play money MTT
The two American giants of the game battled it out heads-up for what was the first ever "Billionaire's Club" title.
This past weekend PokerStars held its inaugural "Billionaire's Club" tournament, an event - which will now become an annual occasion - reserved for elites who've somehow managed to accumulate over one billion play money chips.
It's been well publicised recently that two of poker's biggest names, Team PokerStars pros Barry Greenstein and Chris Moneymaker, have been indulging in the play money form of the game and doing rather well in the process.
That dominating grip certainly proved evident on the format's biggest ever stage (the billion chip buy-in was ten times higher than the previous 100 million chip benchmark set by PokerStars), with Greenstein eventually topping the 31-player field after an intense heads up battle with the infamous 2003 WSOP Main Event champion.
"Facing Chris Moneymaker heads up was a lot of fun," Greenstein told PokerStars. "I thought Chris got the best of me in play, but I got the better cards overall and won a race in the final hand to secure the title."
"I streamed the whole thing live"
For his efforts, Greenstein was awarded some 13.9 billion play money chips, as well as the prestige of becoming the event's first ever victor. But he seemed more enthusiastic about the fact he'd managed to stream the entire tournament using his Twitch channel.
"I'm proud to have won the first ever championship. I really enjoyed playing the event - especially because I was able to share it with my Twitch audience."
Since he resides in the United States where playing real money games at PokerStars is still forbidden, Greenstein will have been starved of the sort of high stakes action that would really generate his channel a substantial following, but this hotly contested event certainly won't have done his cause any harm.
As for Moneymaker, his 9.3 billion chip runner up prize was enough to catapult him back to the top of the Billionaire's Club World Rankings, a weekly list - which he has been dominating - published by PokerStars of its top play money balances.
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