Having been forced to postpone the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas due to COVID-19, the popular tournament series moved online instead this year and quickly proceeded to set new benchmarks for the online poker world.
Kicking off in July and concluding this week with the $5,000 buy-in WSOP Online Main Event, the series again highlighted the enormous popularity of online gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic by breaking multiple records, including the largest online poker tournament prize pool in history at US$27,559,500 and the most entries for any single WSOP event with 44,576.
The US$3,904,685 awarded to WSOP Online Main Event winner Stoyan Madanzhiev, from Bulgaria, was also the biggest online poker prize ever awarded.
Offering 85 WSOP bracelet events, WSOP online attracted a total of 239,754 entries representing 166 nationalities, accessed via global online poker platform GGPoker. The WSOP revealed there were 45 events with prize pools exceeding US$1 million, five events exceeding US$5 million and five with more than 10,000 entries each.
Madanzhiev outlasted a field of 5,802 players to win the Main Event, with China’s Wenling Gao finishing runner-up for US$2,748,605.