The $6 million guaranteed 2023 PokerStars WCOOP Main Event hit exactly 600 entries, creating a round $6 million prize pool and a first prize of $1,047,257.40. With 38 runners still left ahead of the Day 3 restart, it might be too soon to declare a winner, but there is a big favourite.
Ivan 'ILS007' Stokes has a ridiculous chip lead that's not far off double the stack of Niklas 'Lena900' Astedt in second place. Stokes has 16,606,251 chips, good for over 200 big blinds at the close of play.
He won a pot of 3,919,392 in the final hand of Day 2, flopping a set of fives to crush Christoph '26071985' Vogelsang's pocket kings. Stokes moved all-in pre-flop over a seemingly standard button raise and will have slept soundly after the 4Q526 board. To give you an idea of stacks, if Vogelsang's kings had held, his stack would have been good for 12th place.
Stokes will be looking over his shoulders at Astedt, though. The Swedish online legend is a GGPoker Team Champion with $2,112,478 in live earnings. That pales when compared to his online earnings of over $22 million. Astedt already has six SCOOP and three WCOOP titles.
One player who won't be making history (again) is Benny 'RunGodlike' Glaser. He's already won seven WCOOP titles in 2023 (that makes 25 COOP titles overall, if you're wondering), and we honestly wouldn't have been surprised to see him go super-deep here, too. He did his best, firing three bullets but only ending as high as 259th in the rankings.
Dominik 'Bounatirou' Nitsche was one of the final players to drop in Day 2, his 44th place finish good for $26,390.40 – a profit of $5,790.40 after his two $10,300 bullets.
Grafton, Dvoress and Oliver still in play
There are some notable names to look out for when the action resumes at 12.30pm ET.
Sam 'SamSquid' Grafton is sitting in 25th place with 2,721,816 chips. He's the only PokerStars ambassador left in after Rafael 'GM_VALTER' Moraes dropped in 51st for a payday of $26,390.40. Moraes was the only other Stars ambassador to cash.
Daniel 'Oxota' Dvoress is also still in the hunt for the title, sitting three places ahead of Grafton and with a similar chip stack. Look further up again, to 18th, and you'll see Chris 'ImDaNuts' Oliver with a stack of 3,270,792 or 41 big blinds.
All 38 players are now guaranteed $32,632.20, and if they survive through to Day 4 they'll have banked at least $94,330.20. Everyone else at the final table will get six figures, apart from the winner, although they will need to avoid doing a deal to get the million.
You can watch all the action cards-up on the PokerStars Twitch channel with a 30-minute delay. That means cards in the air on Twitch at 1pm ET with the deadly duo of James Hartigan and Joe Stapleton on comms. Play will break when we get to the final table, which will play out at the same time on October 4.
