PokerStars’ flagship online tournament series, the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), has completed another record-breaking year with a guarantee-busting $73,718,745.19 total prize pool across 82 events from 4-27 September.
This year PokerStars also launched a complementary series, Mini-WCOOP, offering low stakes entry into the WCOOP experience for the first time.
Mini-WCOOP generated a total prize pool of $3,947,555.76 contested by 168,117 unique players from 154 countries.
To celebrate globally, PokerStars is giving an even wider audience the chance to take part in WCOOP action with four Play Money WCOOP events taking place over two days in November:
Highlights of this year’s WCOOP included:
* The 2016 WCOOP surpassed the 2015 record by more than $7 million, attracting 24,533 unique players from 126 different countries;
* The three-day WCOOP Main Event featured a $10,052,879 total prize pool was one of the five richest PokerStars tournaments of the year;
* PokerStars added the richest buy-in online tournament ever held: the $102,000 buy-in Super High Roller event, which was won by ‘bencb789’ from Sweden who beat Fedor ‘CrownUpGuy’ Holz, to the $1,172,360.60 first prize (see previous report);
* Event #70: $21,000 PLO [6-Max, High-Roller] broke a record of its own by generating the biggest ever Omaha prize pool of just over $1.9 million – ‘ludovi333’ beat 92 other entries to the top prize of $462,182.17;
* Arguably the most notable win of the mini-WCOOP 82-event series was that of French nurse and poker enthusiast Iwan ‘Ethanolol’ Robert, who simultaneously won Event #27 and #28, topping fields of 18,856 and 11,982 respectively.