Back in the summer, the World Series of Poker’s Online Series had a flagship event – the $5,000 Main Event. Hosted by GGPoker, it would break records to the extent that this week, the Guinness World Records department have been in touch with GGPoker ambassador Daniel Negreanu himself to award the commendation.
Here’s the GGPoker video where Negreanu takes the award from Michael Empric, the official Adjudicator for Guinness World Records.
The single largest prize pool for an online poker tournament, the WSOP Main Event being cancelled in the summer led to record numbers in the GGPoker event instead, with a $27,559,500 prize pool created by 5,802 players putting up the $5,000 entry fee.
With 54 WSOP bracelets given away on GGPoker during their WSOP bracelet events, the winner of the $5,000-entry Main Event, Bulgarian poker player Stoyan Madanzhiev, won $3,904,685 as one of the 728 players who cashed in the tournament.
Steve Preiss, Head of Poker Operations at GGPoker, was – as you can imagine – delighted with the Guinness World Records team being in touch.
“This Guinness World Records title was on our radar from the very beginning,” he said. “Players and fans of poker expect nothing less than record-breaking prizes when it comes to the World Series of Poker and GGPoker delivered.”
Ty Stewart, the World Series of Poker’s Director was equally impressed with the turnout and hailed it as a huge achievement by GGPoker themselves.
“Breaking a Guinness World Records title shows what happens when you combine GGPoker’s amazing platform with the World Series of Poker brand. This will be a tough record to beat.”
Stewart may well be spot on, there. While GGPoker’s phenomenal effort warrants the biggest of congratulations, if there is any hint of a World Series of Poker Main Event next year taking place live at the Rio in Las Vegas, it’s unlikely that the online version would sell out so well.
That said, a natural counter-point to the argument that a WSOP Main Event taking place with everyone in Sin City would take the players away from the online version is that hype can build the online version. Rather than go against the online version, if the two hypothetical events were staged at different times of the year (the live version in July, the online version in December, for instance), it might benefit both eventual prizepools.
While there’s no guarantee that there will ever be another WSOP Online Main Event, there will never be a better achievement within poker than to have ridden out a ban on live play is such a record-breaking way. The World Series of Poker and GGPoker deserve all the plaudits for taking on and climbing that particular mountain.
