PokerStars put the totals on the 25th World Championship of Online Poker on October 8, from the Isle of Man: 121 events, 350 tournaments across the High, Medium and Low tiers, 350 champions and just over $49 million in prize money, after more than three weeks of play. The six Main Events, three in No-Limit Hold’em and three in Pot-Limit Omaha, paid more than $7.5 million between them against a combined guarantee the room had set at $6.5 million.
The release gives the closing date and the Main Event launch, Saturday, September 26, but not the first day of the schedule. The series page carries that gap as an open item.
The leaderboard and the record
FAL1st won the Overall Player of the Series leaderboard and its $20,000 top prize from a $100,000 leaderboard pool. The same screen name sits in fifth place, with $1,240, on the ledger’s record of the $530 Stud, which is the only one of FAL1st’s finishes the sources on file printed in full. A leaderboard is won on volume across the whole series; the desk has the title and the prize, not the finishes that produced them.
Benny “RunGodlike” Glaser won three events and took his WCOOP career total to 19 titles, a record for the series. Two of the three came on the night of September 26, in the $530 Stud and the rescheduled $530 HORSE, less than three hours apart. Renan “Internett93o” Bruschi and Johannes “Jepser8” Straver finished with four titles each.
Titles by country
Brazil 86, United Kingdom 42, Austria 27, Canada 17. The Brazilian total is close to a quarter of all 350 titles, and the ledger’s Main Event final tables show the same weight: five of the nine finalists in the $10,300 NLHE High were Brazilian or played from Brazil, and the $1,050 Medium final had three. The desk records what the release printed and does not attach countries to screen names the source left blank, which is why the country column on some records is thinner than the release’s totals suggest.
The Main Events on the ledger
Felipe “lipe piv” Boianovsky won the $10,300 NLHE Main Event (High) for $551,632 from 289 entries, the first player to win both the SCOOP High Main Event (June 2023) and the WCOOP High Main Event. Aku “Aku1206” Joentausta won the $10,300 PLO Main Event for $179,610 from a 47-entry field. Alejandro “[Papo]AR” Lococo won the $1,050 NLHE Medium for $343,242 from 2,310 entries and ihor888888 the $109 NLHE Low for $172,022 from 14,533. The Medium and Low PLO Main Event results were not in the sources on file.
The PLO High figure says something about the format that the hold’em numbers hide: 47 entries at $10,300 is a $470,000 pool before fees, and the winner’s $179,610 is the smallest Main Event first prize on the ledger. The high roller end of Omaha online is a very small room.
Reading the $49 million
Just over $49 million across 350 tournaments is an average of about $140,000 a tournament, but the distribution is nothing like that: the six Main Events took $7.5 million of it, and the Low tier events with five-figure pools make up most of the count. The desk does not have the per-event totals for the full schedule and does not estimate them from the headline. The series page carries the figures the release gave, the two Main Event records with full payouts, the two Glaser results, and the sources with their dates.
The 26th edition will presumably set a larger guarantee. The release does not say.
- EEGaming (PokerStars release), Oct 8, 2026
- EEGaming (guarantees), Sep 23, 2026