World Championship Of Online Poker Schedule Announced

PokerStars has just announced the schedule for the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) 2021. The exact dates for the different events have not yet been announced, but the general schedule for the event has been declared. WCOOP 2021 will be held from August 22nd to September 15th.

The guarantee pool for WCOOP will be $100 million, the highest ever in the history of the event over the last two decades. In 2020 the guarantee was set at $80 million, but the prize pool was worth $99.9 million in the end. There were 1,120,910 participants across 75 events.

But last year, all retail gambling industries were shut down due to the pandemic, so inline poker tournaments were experiencing a boom. As more and more retail facilities open up this year, experts are keen to see what happens to online games.

WCOOP 2020 saw the second-highest number of entries for any WCOOP event ever. But last year, despite the rising trend, WCOOP’s main event fell a little short of its guarantee of $10 million.

WCOOP was first launched in 2002. It only had nine events and had around 2,452 entries in its first year. But even then, the prize pool was able to reach almost $800,000. Since then, WCOOP has grown every year, with more and more events being added to the schedule.

A major turning point for WCOOP was in 2008 when it shot up from just 22 events to 33 events, and the prize pool crossed $17 million.

In 2017, PokerStars created two tiers of WCOOP events, the low buy-in tier and the high buy-in tier. In 2018, three tiers, low, medium, and high buy-in, were introduced. WCOOP still follows this structure. 

The combined prize pool for all WCOOP events so far is $973 million. With this year’s prize pool, WCOOP is expected to cross the $1 billion mark.

Russians have the highest wins in WCOOP events, followed successively by UK, USA, Brazil, and Canada. But players from New Jersey and Michigan cannot be a part of WCOOP. They have their own local COOP events to participate in.