PokerStars Set to Kick Off 12th World Championship of Online Poker

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Friday, September 6th, 2013 | Written by Stephen Smith

PokerStars is now just one day away from the launch of the 12th edition of the largest online poker tournament series by nearly any yardstick you can imagine – the World Championship of Online Poker.

The 2013 World Championship of Online Poker – better known by its far more manageable acronym WCOOP – runs from September 8th all the way through the 29th.

Overview of the 2013 WCOOP

During that three week stretch, the WCOOP at PokerStars will play host to 66 unique events covering nearly every type of game, every format and every buy-in level you can think of.

All told, players will be competing for a staggering $40mm in guaranteed prize pools spread across those 66 events. The crowning event of the WCOOP is, without a doubt, the Main Event, where a minimum of $1.25mm awaits the winner. And, if history is any indication, the person who walks away with that title will almost certainly pocket more than the guaranteed amount.

In 2012 it was Russian online poker player maratik who claimed what most would agree to be the most prestigious title in online poker tournament play by winning the WCOOP Main Event and booking the $1mm+ in prize money along with the bracelet and place in the history of Internet poker.

Leading up to the Main Event are 65 other events spanning an astounding array of games and formats. The dominant game type is, unsurprisingly, No Limit Hold’em. WCOOP participants will find NLHE tournaments featuring such twists as rebuys, add-ons, antes, turbo blind structures and knockouts – just to name a few.

But while NLHE does comprise the majority of the schedule for the 2013 WCOOP, it’s far from the only game in town. Players will also have the option to participate in a variety of Omaha tournaments, including standard variants like PLO and Omaha 8 or better and newer takes on the game such as Courchevel. Mixed games are also well-represented, as are popular stud variants such as Razz.

PokerStars is compatible with all major operating systems and offers a dedicated Mac version of their online poker site along with native mobile poker apps.

Format was innovative when introduced in 2002

At this stage of the online poker industry, the major tournament series is just about ubiquitous. There’s the popular FTOPs series hosted by Full Tilt Poker and the iPOPs annual event hosted by iPoker skins like William Hill.

With that commonality comes the temptation to assume that the WCOOP is just one among many similar offerings. But when PokerStars hosted the inaugural World Championship of Online Poker in 2002, they were breaking entirely new ground for an online poker room.

Series has proven global appeal

The longevity and consistent growth of the WCOOP is a reflection of the series’ truly global appeal, one driven by both the astounding amount of prize money at stake and the unrivaled prestige that accompanies a WCOOP bracelet.

Over three dozen individual countries are represented in the list of WCOOP champions, ranging from Canada to Cyprus to Colombia to China.

Interestingly, the United States remains atop nearly every one of the WCOOP by-country records despite the fact that U.S. players have been unable to take part in the WCOOP since 2010. That absence is, of course, due to the infamous events of online poker’s Black Friday, which saw the U.S. Government truncate the number of real-money poker sites available to American players.

For example, the United States continues to enjoy a more-than-healthy lead in the all-time entrants by country tally with over 148,000. The next closest country doesn’t even manage half of that tally; the UK claims the second spot with a relatively paltry 68,814 and Germany rounds out the top three with 51,010.