14th WCOOP Starts Today

The World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) begins today (September 6th, 2015) with 70 separate events on the schedule. Running over 3 weeks, and with buy-ins ranging from $109 to a massive $51,000, a phenomenal $45,000,000 has been guaranteed.

For lovers of stats, the PokerStars team have just released some staggering numbers about their flagship online festival. The most anticipated of these is the chance to break $500m in winnings over all of the WCOOP events combined. The total amount won in 487 events -since the WCOOP’s inception back in 2002- currently stands at £449,680,133 and with this year’s huge guaranteed prize-fund it surely won’t take too many extra players and re-buys to crash through.

The single biggest prize-pool for a WCOOP event was the $12,215,000 handed out in the 2010 Main Event. 2,443 players bought in for $5,200 each and it was Tyson ‘Potterpoker’ Marks who walked off with the biggest individual prize in online tournament history – a staggering $2,278,097 (and not forgetting the 50 cents!)

The PokerStars organizers also expect the 1,000,000 total all-time entrants mark to finally be broken, and come September 9th at 2pm ET, the milestone 500th WCOOP event will kick-off – a $320NL Heads-up NL Hold’em tournament guaranteed to the tune of $300k.

With the record-breaking $51,000 buy-in Super-High Roller starting on the 20th( (guaranteed for $1m) and dozens of other smaller events either side, the current record of 4 title wins ( by Dan ‘djk123’ Kelly) and 82 WCOOP cashes (by Jon ‘Pearljammer’ Turner) could well be smashed along the way.