What would you expect a €100 buy-in tournament with an €80,000 guarantee to pay out?
Perhaps €100,000. Maybe a little more if the tournament gets a big turnout.
On Winamax, it paid out more than €1 million.
The tournament, which ran as part of the recent Winamax Series, attracted 1,108 entries and eventually awarded €1,022,441, more than 10 times the original guarantee. The reason was the Space KO format, which can turn an ordinary knockout into a huge payday.
One player, “oldepaso68,” collected €922,104 in bounties during the tournament. That included an €838,000 bounty from a single knockout.
The player also won the tournament itself, although the first-place prize of just over €5,000 was tiny compared with the bounty haul. “oldepaso68” finished with €927,783 in total winnings, meaning around 90% of everything paid out in the tournament went to one player.
And the whole thing was over in less than five hours, lasting just 258 minutes. That means “oldepaso68” effectively won €3,574 every minute, or around €60 every second.
What Makes Space KO Different?
Winamax launched Space KO in December 2024, bringing the random multiplier concept found in games such as Expresso and jackpot sit and go style formats into MTTs.
Every bounty in a Space KO tournament receives a random multiplier between 0.4x and 100x. The 100x multiplier occurs roughly once in every 1,000 bounty awards.
Unlike a mystery bounty tournament, where the value of a bounty is generally revealed after a player is knocked out and once players are in the money, Space KO bounties are active from the beginning of the tournament.
There is also a progressive element just like in a PKO tournament. When a player knocks someone out, half of the bounty is paid to the player making the knockout, while the other half is added to their own bounty.
That means a player’s bounty can grow throughout the tournament, creating the possibility of an increasingly large payday for whoever eventually knocks them out.
The latest tournament provided an extreme example. The €838,000 bounty collected by “oldepaso68” was the largest single bounty ever awarded in a Space KO tournament and, in fact, one of the largest payouts in the French poker giant’s history.
Winamax Has Some Ridiculous Records
The €1 million-plus payout is another example of Winamax finding unusual ways to create huge prizes. Its Expresso games, in particular, have produced some of the site’s most memorable jackpot stories.
Hitting a jackpot in an Expresso or Spin & Go-style game requires an enormous amount of luck, but one Winamax player has managed to win three separate €1 million Expresso jackpots in just two years and came close to winning a fourth.
Another ridiculous record belongs to a player who opened a new Winamax account and hit a €1 million jackpot less than two hours later.
There has even been a €1 million Expresso jackpot won from a €1 buy-in.
Expresso has been running for more than 13 years and has produced almost 170 €1 million jackpots since its launch in 2013.
Space KO is a different type of game, but it takes a similar idea — the possibility that an ordinary buy-in can suddenly produce an extraordinary payout — and puts it into a tournament. That creates some interesting situations that simply do not exist in a conventional MTT.
A player can build a huge bounty during the tournament and become the target of everyone at the table, while another player can potentially turn a single knockout into the biggest payday of their poker career.
It also means the largest payout does not necessarily go to the tournament winner. In this case, “oldepaso68” happened to win both the tournament and the huge bounty. But the €838,000 knockout was worth far more than the tournament’s first-place prize.
Other Poker Sites Are Taking Notice
The idea is also starting to appear elsewhere. Another French online poker room, Betclic, has launched its own version, called Smash Knockout, while other operators and networks are working on different variations of mystery and progressive bounty formats.
iPoker is developing a Progressive Mystery Bounty format, while US-facing offshore WPN (ACR Poker) is also working on the same format.
Those formats are not identical to Space KO, but they show the growing interest in adding more randomness and larger potential prizes to traditional MTTs.
Space KO itself is still relatively young, but the latest result is difficult to ignore. An €80,000 guarantee turning into a €1,022,441 payout, with one player collecting €922,104 in bounties, is the kind of result that gives a new tournament format a story of its own.
Winamax has already shown what can happen when the jackpot concept is applied to sit and gos. Now Space KO is showing what it can look like when the same basic idea is taken into an MTT.
