The 2017 World Championship of Online Poker, hosted by PokerStars, is set to kick off a little more than two weeks from now. One of the world’s most prestigious online poker festivals first took place in 2002 when it featured nine events only.
Fifteen years later, it has turned into a favorite arena for online poker players from all around the world to clash against each other and hopefully win big.
Organizers released the schedule for the 2017 WCOOP on Thursday. This year, the championship will feature 81 events. PokerStars also announced that there will not be a Mini-WCOOP to follow immediately after the main championship. The poker operator instead added low-stakes tournaments to the WCOOP schedule, with those featuring buy-ins of 1/20th of the regular events. The low-stakes tier guarantees over $11 million in prize money for participants.
The 2017 WCOOP is set to take place from September 3 all the way through September 26. It will include a plethora of poker variants and formats as well as of buy-in levels so as to please players with different preferences.
The $5,200 Main Event will certainly be the tournament to attract the greatest attention. The event will feature a guaranteed prize pool of $10 million, which promises for quality action and fierce competition among entries.
Last year’s WCOOP included 82 events in its schedule and distributed more than $73 million to thousands of players. The 2016 WCOOP Main Event attracted as many as 2,091 entries who created a prize pool of $10,052,879.79. Germany’s Jonas Lauck, a player known by the llJaYJaYll screen name on PokerStars, topped the massive field to collect the first-place prize of $1,517,541.25. The 2016 WCOOP Main Event Champion was actually among the players to win the biggest from the annual online poker series.
Biggest WCOOP Main Event Winners
As mentioned above, the first WCOOP edition took place in the summer of 2002 with only nine tournaments on its schedule. The Main Event back then was a $1,050 tournament that attracted 238 entries for a $238,000 prize pool. A Sweden-based player with a screen name MultiMarine won the tournament for a $65,450 payout.
The WCOOP grew and developed over the years to become one of the most popular online poker series.
In 2010, the WCOOP Main Event drew a massive field of 2,443. The tournament’s buy-in had already been set at $5,200 at the time. Tyson Marks, known under the POTTERPOKER screen name, was the lucky player who collected $2,278,097.50, the largest ever first-place prize awarded to a WCOOP Main Event winner.
A year earlier, in 2009, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, or Jovial Gent as he had named himself on PokerStars, took down the Main Event for $1,715,200. The player emerged the victor from a field of 2,144 entries.
In 2013, PlayinWasted, or David Kaufmann from Germany, won the WCOOP Main Event, good for $1,493,499.15. His task was to survive through a filed of 2,133 entries and he performed beautifully.
