With main event now in progress, Pokerstars has released some numbers on its 2015
World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), which has been a record-breaker.
Total prize pool over the 70 events reached $66,245,305, making this years outing the richest in the series’ 14-year history, surpassing the previous record of $63,157,150 (WCOOP 2010) by more than $3 million.
It has been a World Championship of significant milestones with WCOOP 2015 pushing the total number of events since the first WCOOP past the 500-event mark (557 in total now), the all-time WCOOP prize money breaching $500 million to finish on $513,596,638 ahead of next year’s Championship, and more than 1,000,000 all-time WCOOP entries.
The number of tournament entries for WCOOP 2015 alone surpassed 100,000 (109,904) with 26,594 unique players from 122 different countries participating.
The $5,200 buy-in Main Event currently running has a prizepool of $10 million and attracted a field of 1,995 players – just 246 were left at the end of the first day, with the cash bubble in sight at position 243..
Earlier this WCOOP, the $51,000 buy-in Super High Roller – the biggest buy-in online poker tournament ever – was won by Ben ‘Ben86’ Tollerenefor $616,518.34 (see previous report).
There were also notable victories for Shaun ‘shaundeeb’ Deeb and Calvin ‘cal42688’ Anderson, who both moved on to joint most all-time ‘COOP (WCOOP, SCOOP, TCOOP) victories with eight each, after taking down events 44 and 62 respectively.
Team PokerStars Pro Jason ‘jcarverpoker’ Somerville, reached a peak audience of 37,434 viewers on Twitch for his ‘Run it UP!’ poker show on September 7 as he came sixth in event 7 for $38,339.
Finally, a new WCOOP Mega Path record was set this year, with the Frequent Player Point satellite route resulting in 99 players qualifying for the $5,200 Main Event. That improves on 2014’s 77 players.