Fall Online Tournament Series 2018: New Industry Record Set, Over $215 Million Paid Out in Prize Money Fall Online Tournament Series 2018: New Industry Record Set, Over $215 Million Paid Out in Prize Money
Key Takeaways
  • More than $215 million was paid out across 1590 tournaments.
  • WCOOP and Powerfest were the top tournament series as they paid out close to $170 million.
  • In the segregated European market, €34.7 million was paid out across four tournament series.

In the last 30 days, seven online operators hosted ten online tournament series spread across the world’s biggest online poker markets. Over $170 million was guaranteed in tournament prize pools with almost all major operators scheduling their largest tournament series in history.

By September 23, all the operators had concluded their tournament series and $217,803,107 in total prize money ($177.5 million in the dot-com market, €34.7 million ($40.3 million) in the segregated European markets) was paid out across a staggering 1590 tournaments.

This makes it the largest ever period for guaranteed prize pools in the history of online poker, and it easily surpassed the $140 million awarded during the spring 2018 season.

This comes despite the industry becoming the target of a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that took place over the last two months, by far the most impactful and widespread attacks that the online poker industry has ever faced.

Eight of the top ten online poker networks suffered downtime before or during their respective online tournament series with 888poker, PokerStars, Winamax, partypoker, and the Americas Cardroom/WPN network all suffering outages.