The 2019 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) has come to an end, with the popular PokerStars online series seeing a huge turnout. So many players competed that the tournament events set a new prize pool record. In total, the series was set to offer $75 million in guaranteed prize money. However, with over 1.2 million player entries, the guarantee would be surpassed by close to $30 million!
Breaking the Record:
The 2018 WCOOP was the previous record holder for largest prize pool with over $99 million on offer. this year, the series saw a total of $104.7 million up for grabs across 20 days of tournament events. The Main Event High tournament awarded $11.18 million in prize money, making it the largest COOP Main Event for the series since 2010!
According to a recent press release…
During the WCOOP, players in Southern Europe had access to the Galactic Series. This tournament option was provided in Portugal, Spain and France. This series also did quite well, surpassing its €15 million guarantee, beating last year’s more than €17 million with €19,419,783 spread across 23 days of gaming. Italy also hosted a Galactic Series, surpassing its €3 million guaranteed with just over €3.7 million on offer.
Continually Breaking Records:
The top online poker brand continues to break records in 2019. While the WCOOP 2019 was a massive success, so was the recent European Poker Tour stop in Barcelona. Earlier this month, PokerStars reported that the stop was so successful that it has now claimed the title as the largest stop in the history of the poker tour, which spans 16 years!
With 12 days of gaming, the EPT Barcelona saw more than 23,600 player registrations with more than €52.9 million in prizes awarded. The series took place from August 20th until September 1st. The Main Event was the largest in the history of the EPT with a total of 1,988 entries. The tournament ended up offering more than €9.6 million in prize money with €1.2 million going to the winner, Simon Brandstrom.
