PokerStars WCOOP Kicks Off Today

September 5, 2008

It’s Friday, September 5, and that means only one thing in the world of online poker – the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) kicks off today.

The first round of the 33-event series is a No Limit Hold’em 6-Max tournament with a $1,000,000 guaranteed prize pool, scheduled to begin at 2:30pm ET. Then, at 4:30pm ET, Event #2 commences – a Pot Limit 5 Card Draw tournament guaranteeing $200,000. Each of these events incurs a buy-in of $215.

The opening day of the PokerStars WCOOP marks the beginning of 18 full days of non-stop action, culminating into the WCOOP Main Event on September 22nd. Each day, PokerStars will host two WCOOP Events, except for September 21st, just before the grandeur of the Main Event.

PokerStars always goes above and beyond the median of major online poker events, and this year’s WCOOP is no different. The online poker room is guaranteeing an awesome $30,000,000 over all 33 events, and the WCOOP Main Event is truly worthy of gawking at as PokerStars is guaranteeing $10,000,000 in the WCOOP Main Event alone.

Several new events have been introduced to the tournament series this year, including two “High Roller” events. The first will take place tomorrow, September 7th, with a $10,300 buy-in and a guaranteed prize pool of $2,000,000. Then, on September 14th, a $25,000 buy-in grants players a seat in the Heads-Up event worth $1,600,000 GTD.

As implausible as it may seem, this year’s WCOOP Main Event will actually be worth about 1/6th of what the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event pays out. That is truly an awe inspiring element of PokerStars, and is practically guaranteed to attract a multitude of today’s top professional poker players.

Thinking back to the inaugural 2002 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker, the main event was worth a purse of $238,000. How does that jump to $10-million over six years? I don’t know – but I like it!