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First WPT Online Series Concludes with Big Numbers

Written by Jennifer Newell
Last updated on
Jennifer Newell

The World Poker Tour had planned for years to expand its offerings online. And when the coronavirus pandemic forced the WPT to postpone or cancel one tournament after another in its Season XVIII – both on the main tour and WPTDeepStacks – the company accelerated its online plans. The WPT announced the first-ever WPT Online Series by PartyPoker.

Action was supposed to start on May 10, but everyone was anxious to get it going, so they moved it up to May 3-19. But the 10 WPT-branded events were a part of a much larger PartyPoker series that ran through the end of May.

Now that it is done and dusted, it’s time to look at the final numbers.

Overall Successes

The entire WPT Online Series by PartyPoker boasted of 94 events over the course of 29 days in May. And it delivered these final tallies:

–Total entries: 111,183 (some reports show 111,170)

–Total prize money awarded: $52,877,550

The series also set records for the most entries in several categories of tournaments:

–Most entries in a WPT Main Tour event: 2,130

–Most entries in a WPTDeepStacks event: 3,554

–Entries in a WPT500 event: 4,828

Leaderboard Champion

The WPT Online Series also updated a points leaderboard throughout the weeks of online tournaments to reward the players who excelled throughout the series as a whole.

In the end, Viktor Ustimov of Russia claimed that title after 15 cashes, three final tables, two victories, and a second-place finish in the WPT Online Championship Main Event.

For those accomplishments, Ustimov won a PartyPoker LIVE Passport worth $11,000. This can be used for any PartyPoker MILLIONS tournament around the world or PartyPoker LIVE Online events over the course of the next 24 months.

Ustimov won with 650 points overall, but those just behind him on the leaderboard also won prizes.

–$5K WPT Passports:  Rui Ferreira, Pascal Hartmann, Fausto Tantillo, Jareth East

–$3,300 WPT Main Event seats:  Dimitar Danchev, Samuel Vousden, Sam Greenwood, Norbert Szecsi, Mohsin Charania

–$550 WPT500 seats:  Fabio Sperling, Juan Pardo Dominguez, Elias Talvitie, Artur Martirosian, Fabrizio Gonzalez

First WPT Online Series Winners

Amongst the 94 tournaments, ten WPT-branded events took on special significance. Not only did they all exceed their prize pool guarantees, they created new WPT tournament winners. We’d like to list all 10 of them here, along with the prize pools for those events, but there is no official list of winners.

So, we’ll just list the numbers for the three most high-profile events of the series:

–$3,200 WPT Online Main Event ($5M GTD) $6.39 million prize pool

     -Christian Jeppson won for $923,786

–$530 WPT500 ($2M GTD) $2,414,000 prize pool

     -Fabio Sperling won for $281,125.93

–$1,600 WPTDeepStacks ($3M GTD), $3,554,000 prize pool

     -Jareth East won for $557,658

Next Up: Summer Series

As players wind down from a whirlwind of online poker tournament action in May, they will have some time to prepare for the upcoming WPT World Online Championships.

Play will begin on July 1 and run through August 9. While the entire series is likely to exceed 100 events in total, there will be 15 WPT-branded championship tournaments. And the highlight of them all will be a $10,300 buy-in Main Event. The freezeout event will offer starting flights on August 1 and August 2, with the playdown to the final table on August 3-4. The final table will play on August 8.

PartyPoker will host the action, of course.

More details about the entire series will be released soon.

 

 

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