WCOOP 2020 Recap — The End

Jon Pill
Posted on: September 28, 2020 10:44 PDT

WCOOP is over for another year. It was a remarkable series.

The series broke a few records, and came close to breaking some others. Because it was so soon after the World Poker Tour World Online Championships and the World Series of Poker Online, it was anyone’s guess if players would be too burned out or too tapped out to show up by the time partypoker was ready to put on its show.

As it happens, players were neither.

They turned up in droves. WCOOP 2020 had 958,717 unique tournament entrants who bought in 1,120,910 times. A surprisingly tight-fisted crew when it came to rebuys then — I guess we really are in a recession.

$99,945,229.85 went out the door in prize monies. That makes 2020’s WCOOP the second-largest one yet when ranked for dollar value. Only last year had more prizes, at a touch over $104 million.

Mind you, this year there were a few extra games running. With 75 different events, each of which was made up of three tourneys (High, Medium, Little), there were 225 titles up for grabs. That is 225 final tables and 225 champions, runners up, and bubble boys.

And 36 events put six figures in the hand of the first place finishers.

The biggest event of the series for entrants was the $2.20 warm-up event. That tourney attracted 123,400 players. Four other events came in at over 25k entrants.

Names and numbers

To paraphrase a mediocre poet: 959k entrants is a statistic, but one man’s second place is a tragedy. To come so close to conquest and to be pipped at the last post, especially in the main event, is tough.

That dishonor went to Tonio "prrrak4783" Röder. Röder lost heads up in the Main Event to Andre “PTFisherman23” Marques.

The monetary difference was minimal thanks to a deal cut when play got down to three. But Röder missed out on his second WCOOP title.

Even so, Röder's run was not as tragic as Teun “tinnoemulder” Mulder's. Mulder took third place, instead of what could very well have been his third WCOOP title.

There were plenty of other tales of woe and wonder. Eighteen players took down two titles apiece. Two more: Tobias “Senkel92” Leknes and Yuri “theNERDguy” Martins took down three each. There are not many players with three titles at all. Let alone three titles from one year.

Martins made seven final tables to get his three titles. But he wasn’t the only one.

On the list of people who made seven final tables are Rinat “Zapahzamazki” Lyapin who took first in two of his seven, but ended up taking second place in three.

Meanwhile, Jussi “calvin7v” Nevanlinna got to seven final tables and whiffed entirely in all but two.

Previous coverage

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Feature image source: Twitter