Poker Stars Announce WCOOP Schedule

While FTOPS is nicely underway, online tournament players are already planning ahead for their future schedule. There is no doubt that many of them will be spending a lot of time on Poker Stars in September, as World Championship of Online Poker kicks off. Stars have just announced the schedule for this year's Series and now the series planning may commence.

Things will start warming up on Sunday, September 7th, with the $109 WCOOP Kickoff tournament, followed by special editions of both $215 Sunday Warm-Up with guaranteed $750,000 and always popular Sunday Million, this time featuring an amazing $1,500,000 prize pool.

The tournaments will then continue all the way through September, with the last events taking place on 28th. In total, this WCOOP will feature 66 different events, from the highly popular No Limit Hold’em, to Pot and Fixed Limit Omaha and O8, Razz, Horse, Five Card Omaha, the whole deal. As for NLHE tournaments, there is also wide variety of options, from standard freezouts to rebuys, KOs and progressive KOs.

Buy-ins range from $109 all the way to $10,300 for the High Roller events, three of which will take place – NLHE, Heads Up, and 8 Game. The last event of the Series is also the one that everybody who is anybody in online poker world will be looking to play – the $5,200 two-day Main Event with the guaranteed prize pool of $10,000,000. Across these 66 events, Poker Stars have guaranteed total of $40,000,000 to be paid out in prize money.

Running alongside WCOOP will also be the Poker Stars Protégé promotion that we’ve written about earlier, which will see four lucky players receive coaching from four members of Team PokerStars Pro – Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier, Andre Akkari, Eugene Katchalov and Vanessa Selbst. These four will receive buy-ins for three WCOOP events, including the Main, and one of them will also get to play in the next year’s PokerStar’s Caribbean Adventure.

Last year, PlayinWasted was able to claim the title in the Main Event and bank just shy of $1.5 million after outlasting 2,132 other players. But all three top finishers walked away millionaires, which is really huge for online tournaments.

This year’s WCOOP will probably at least match last year’s numbers. Overall prize pool in 2013 was $62,326,000, which shattered into pieces the $40 million guaranteed and there is no real reason to believe that this year’s Series will not do equally well.

As it is still a month away, there is also plenty of time for players with somewhat shallower pockets to earn their seats in desired tournaments via satellites, and there is no doubt that many will apply themselves to get their shot at some life changing money. I am sure that most of you still remember the epic conclusion of WCOOP 2012 and the famous I wont million story about turning just 40 FPPs into a cool million!