While other poker sites are forced to shell out cash from their tills to meet tournament guarantees, PokerStars isn’t sharing in their woes entirely. In its second week, PokerStars 2008 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) is still drawing in players like bees attracted to honey—particularly the No-Limit Hold’em tournaments.

WCOOP Event # 23 had a $500,000 Guarantee. Although the NLHE tournament had a somewhat pricey $500 + $30 buy-in with one rebuy and one add-on, a total of 1,159 avid poker players entered the event. Over 800 rebuys and almost 1000 add-ons pumped up the pot even further, ensuring a prize pool that reached $1,460,000. You can be sure the both the players and PokerStars were happy when the final pot was almost a million dollars over the tournament guarantee.

With such a monster pot on the line, a lot of the poker pros we stalk decided to venture out into the online tournament world to grab a piece of the prize pie. And what do you know? A lot of them did well. Bertrand Grospellier took home $10,950 for 15th place. Greg Raymer joined the fun and finished in 89th place for $2,482. Humberto Brenes also joined the online poker frenzy and came in at a respectable 140th place ($2,190).

Two separate deals were made in the final table. When the dust settled and only four players remained standing, a four-way deal was organized. When ILAN17 and soon after, imeasy2read busted out for $169,804 each, ddrufnek and luckyuli found themselves heads-up. The two players negotiated another deal to revise the previous agreement. In the end, it was ddrufnek who triumphed with $194,902 in his PokerStars’ account. No tears for Luckyuli since his second place finish just made him $184,902 richer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Online Poker, Poker Events, Poker Players, Poker Tournaments, Poker Winners, PokerStars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.