PokerStars WCOOP 9

: The PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker had an exciting first day with players taking home thousands of dollars.

Last Sunday the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker had a great start with two massive events, attracting huge amounts of players and with some giant payouts. In the end “AlexKP” and “CrabMaki” won the first two titles of the WCOOP taking home six figure sums.

This year’s WCOOP Event 1 was the $215 No Limit Hold’em 6-max tournament. The competition had a guaranteed prize pool of $1.25 million, this grew to a massive $1.8 million when more than 9000 players decided to take part.

PokerStars was well represented at the event which 56 professionals from their poker room taking part. Eleven of them managed to cash with Randy “nanonoko” Lew in 33rd place, Noah “Exclusive” Boeken in 87th place and Barry “barryg1” Greenstein in at 110th place.

However, last Sunday really belongs to AlexKP, he had a huge chip advantage of over 50 million chips when he entered the heads-up with “Tutanharmon1”. Initially AlexKP refused to chop, he said to his opponent “If you get to 30 million we can talk”. Soon after a large pot put Tutanharmon1 over 30 million chip, he again proposed a chop to AlexKP who kept his word and agreed to an uneven chop, leaving $25,000 to go to the winner. It did not take long for AlexKP to gain control of all his opponents chips. The added $25K brought AlexKP’s days winnings to a massive $257,000. Tutanharmon1 finished his day with a nice $198,274.48.

Event 2 was the $10,300 No Limit Hold’em High Roller tournament, here “CrabMaki” came out on top of the 313 player field. Originally the event had a $2 million guaranteed prize pool, however, the players made that grow to $3.13 million. There were 21 PokerStars pros taking part in this event. They did fairly well over all with Chris Moneymaker, Ville Wahlbeck and four others cashing. Wahlbeck finished second in the event and took home $453,850.

However, despite Wahlbeck’s great success, CrabMaki ultimately won the day. He had a nut flush on the final hand which sealed his fate as the winner. At the end of the game CrabMaki collected his $605,655 prize brining the first day of the 9th WCOOP to an exciting end.