This year’s World Championship of Online Poker is in full swing at PokerStars, with players from around the globe competing for awesome prize pools in exciting tournaments. We’re fast-approaching the halfway mark of the series, so a huge amount of cash has already been won but, more importantly, there’s also a lot of it up for grabs. Event 28 wrapped up earlier this week, and the lucky winner to walk away with the number one spot was Schildy1984 of Austria, who received $206,280 for a job well done.
The World Championship of Online Poker is pretty much exactly what the name suggests. It can be seen as the internet’s answer to the World Series of Poker, and the PokerStars hosted series is by far and away the largest such online series around. This 2011 series boasts a massive combined guaranteed prize pool of $30,000,000, which is much larger than many were expecting given the withdrawal of PokerStars from the US market. The combined prize pool is spread over 62 events this year, which offer a great variety so players of any game should be able to find a tournament they’ll love.
Event 28 was one of the more standard formats, a simple No Limit Holdem tournament with no surprises. The buy-in was respectable at $1,000, and 1146 players decided to register and take their shot at the money. This many contestants lead to an almost doubling of the prizepool from its guaranteed $600,000 to the final figure of $1,146,000, to be divided among the top 135 players, with the winner allocated over $200,000. The event dragged on over two days before finally finishing less than an hour into September 15th.
After nearly two days of grueling button clicking and close decisions, the tournament got down to just three entrants, two players from Austria and one from neighboring Australia. The Australian player, delaney_kid, was Schildy1984’s first casualty, and was sent to the rail in third place. This gave Schildy1984 a slightly more than 3:2 chip lead against fellow countryman TheFan83 as Heads Up play commenced. While the chip edge was small, it was more than enough for Schildy who dispensed his opponent within a dozen hands when his flopped overpair turned a set to beat TheFan83’s two pair when the money went all-in on the river. Runner-up TheFan83 received just under $150,000 for his efforts, and the winner on the day Schildy1984 walked away with the pride, the title, and $206,280.00 in tournament winnings.
Final Table Results are as follows:
1 – Schlidy1984 (Austria) $206,280.00
2 – TheFan83 (Austria) $147,031.80
3 – delaney_kid (Australia) $110,016.00
4 – d-mon-d (Norway) $82,512.00
5 – djibh (Canada) $57,300.00
6 – touchmynuts1 (Ukraine) $45,840.00
7 – lindeyloo22 (Canada) $34,380.00
8 – anguila (Spain) $22,920.00
9 – hithenose (Spain) $13,752.00