GGPoker awarded a trinity of World Series Of Poker Circuit rings over the weekend. The prizes were awarded as part of their enormous $100 million guaranteed Winter Online Circuit series.
The three rings awarded this weekend bring the total up to five.
The weekend prior saw prizes awarded for the WSOPC #3: $3,000 Deepstack No-Limit Hold’em Championship and a $10,300 High Roller event. It also saw the kick-off of the BIG 50. However, this last event didn't conclude until this weekend.
This weekend's other jewelry was handed out to the winners of WSOPC #4: $800 Monster Stack No Limit Hold’em and WSOPC #5: $600 Pot-Limit Omaha.
With five rings awarded there are still thirteen more to go for this Winter Series.
Winner, winner, turkey dinner
The third BIG 50 this year pulled another huge crowd. This should have surprised no one. After all, the WSOP Online's BIG 50 in the summer pulled in a record-breaking 44,576 entries. A record it still holds.
This WSOPC Online edition of the BIG 50 didn't quite make the same bang. But with 31,291 entries, it was certainly nothing to sniff at.
The 31k entries made for a prize pool of $1,439,386. Of that, $168,810 was up top for first.
Unsurprisingly, given the size of the event, there weren't any really big names at the final table. But that first-place prize money ultimately went to Aleksey "ImLuckPads" Savenkov. This represents more than all of his live winnings to date combined. Even so, he's FT'd a few EPT events in Sochi over the years and is no slouch when it comes to poker.
Luxembourgish pro Sihao Zhang took down the $800 Monster Stack. The event barely scraped over guarantee with $1,060,200 in the prize pool. This came from 924 players plus 461 re-entries.
Zhang made $140,472 for his victory.
By comparison to the other events, the $600 Pot-Limit Omaha bracelet event was more low-key. There were just 619 players. Still, a relatively high number of rebuys — Omaha can be like that — brought the total number of entries to 1,041. This made for a $593,370 prize pool.
Pulkit Goyal from India took the event down for $82,052. He's having a good year at GGPoker's Omaha tables, having come 9th in the $800 WSOP Online PLO event.
Winter wonderland
These WSOPC events have been running since December 13th and will continue until January 10th as GGPoker tries to blot out their competition's Winter series.
December, with its multiple holidays and — North of the tropics — its long nights and cold weather, is a traditional boom time for online poker. Coupled with the widespread introversion that COVID has thrust upon us, poker sites are looking to spin yellow snow into gold right now. The result is a glut of online poker tournaments.
GGPoker is running these WSOPC events, handily capitalizing on the publicity from the live legs of the WSOP. PokerStars is winding up to their Winter Blowout events. While PartyPoker is leaning into the current bump in PKO tourneys, and running a KO Series from Christmas this year to January 19th, 2021. They've also just finished running the Irish Poker Master's online.
It will be interesting to see if and how this shows in terms of player retention. For that we will need to wait for the numbers to come in around springtime. Lockdowns started kicking in around March this year, so we won't have like-for-like data for both 2020 and 2021 until the daffodils start blooming.
In the meantime, whichever site you play at, you can probably find an MTT to your liking this holiday season.
Featured image source: Flickr
