The World Championship of Online Poker, or WCOOP for short, is the holy grail of online poker, where titles are compared to bracelets from the WSOP live festival. This year's almost month-long festival brought a lot of interesting stories, hundreds of new champions and more than 80 million dollars in total guarantees. Everything ended in the past hours, but the finish was extraordinary!
The race for the Player of the Year
The organizers could not have wished for a better conclusion even in the race in the leaderboard of the entire festival, where two days before the end, the unstoppable Benny Glaser overtook Patrick Leonard after winning his seventh title. We've written about Benny several times in recent weeks, and you can look forward to an exclusive interview in the near future!
Considering this course, it was clear that the overall champion would be decided only in the last tournaments, and those turned out better in Leonard's favor. "pad1161" won 4 titles this year, including the World Heads-up Championship, but he himself declared on Twitter that in his eyes Benny is the real champion.
Two royal flushes in 20 minutes?!
Every poker player knows that hitting the strongest hand in poker happens literally once in a lifetime. The percentage chance of completing a Royal Flush is 0.000154%, or in other words, the chance is 649,739 : 1. But even that didn't stop the player of the year, Patrick Leonard, who hit not one, but two royal flushes on the tables, within 20 minutes!
In the first case, pads1161 limped at the final table of the $2,100 event with K Q and was rewarded with a dream flop in the form of T A J . To make matters worse, just 20 minutes later he hit the strongest hand again in the $109 NLHE event, where he was certainly happy that his two-pair opponent bluffed him and gave him all in on the river.
Main Event champion
The almost month-long festival was closed, as usual, by the Main Event, a lucrative 4-day event that, with a buy-in of $10,300, with $6,000,000 guarantee. In this case, the guarantee was collected thanks to 401 brave people who took care of exactly 600 entries in the online version of the famous ME WSOP. As a result, cash prizes awaited the top 79 players, with $1,047,257 reserved for the champion.
They ended up without a deal in the hands of Ivan "ILS007" Stokes, who went through the tournament like a knife through butter. At the end of the first day of play, Stokes grabbed the chip leader position, but he didn't let it go for the next three days of play! At the final table, he also had to deal with such names as Mario "livinmydream1" Mosboeck, Kayhan "KayhanMok" Mokri or Niklas "Lena900" Astedt, but none of them were able to take take the title away from him. Hats down!
Final table results:
- Ivan "ILS007" Stokes (United Kingdom) - $1,047,257
- ShipitFTW911 (Sweden) - $765,389
- Juan "xPastorcitox" Pastor (Argentina) - $559,385
- Niklas "Lena900" Astedt (Sweden) - $408,827
- Leonard "Grozzorg" Maue (Germany) - $298,792
- Jamil "Jamil11" Wakil (Canada) - $218,372
- Kelvin "Kelvin_FP:AR" Kerber (Brazil) - $159,598
- Mario "livinmydream1"Mosboeck (Austria) - $116,642
- Kayhan "KayhanMok" Mokri (Norway) - $94,330
Source: PS, Poker.org, PokerStrategy
