Pokerstars has released the schedule for its popular 2014 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) which this year will include 66 events and guaranteed prize pools totalling $40 million.
The annual series will start September 7 and run through September 28, kicking off with a $109 buy-in NLHE event and two $215 buy-in no-limit hold’em events that include a Sunday Million special tournament with $1.5 million guaranteed prize pool.
The $5,200 buy-in Main Event this year carries a guaranteed prize pool of $10 million will take place September 28-29.
Tournament observers expect this year’s WCOOP to surpass the 2013 edition, which featured a similar number of events and guarantees, but at the end of the day delivered total pay-outs of $62 million as the number of entrants soared 15 percent to 144,945.
As usual, the company is running a number of online qualifiers for the various events, with buy-ins as low as a $1.
In related news, another Pokerstars tournament – the WCOOP Challenge Series – captured the headlines with a big win in the main event earlier this week.
The Challenge consisted of 9 events culminating in the $2,100 buy-in main event with re-entries allowed, with US-Canadian player Grayson “gray31” Ramage emerging victorious to claim over half-a-million dollars in prize money after a close heads up with Denmark’s Andreas “Hoegh93″ Hogo.
Ramage took the game after re-entering, one of 256 players who availed themselves of that opportunity in a field of 1,243, generating a prize pool of $2,998,000.
Six of the nine players at the final table benefited from a second entry investment.
The final table payments looked like this:
Grayson Ramage $502,165
Andreas “Hoegh93″ Hogo $367,255
Guyguy12 $277,315
Kyle “weekesy333″ Weekes $203,864
Andreas Christoforou $146,902
GR8MIND $116,922
Ssick_OnE $86,942
Sebastian “p0cket00″ Sikorski $56,962
Matias “Festivuss” Grebanja $30,879