The inaugural WPTDeepStacks London Online has reached its conclusion. The series saw 16 events played over the course of a week and generated $2,280,730 in prizes.
It was a good series for Brazilian players as four of the last five events were won by players from the South American country. The Main Event was no exception as player paulinhoo00 took down the two-day tournament for a $233,705 payday.
The online series, held on 888poker, was a success, drawing in 8735 entries throughout the course of the week —an impressive figure considering both PokerStars and GGPoker were running their own huge spring festivals at the same time.
The series culminated in a $1050 buy-in Main Event. 973 players stumped up the cash and a further 114 rebuys took the prize pool to $1,087,000, surpassing its million-dollar guarantee. There were good runs from several 888 sponsored players, including Dominik Nitsche—who made the final table, finishing 8th for $21,740.
An Ambitious Series Pays Off for WPT
Vice-President of WPT Europe Hermance Blum was enthusiastic about the new venture, saying.
“*We are very pleased by our first joint event online with 888poker*,” she said in a statement to pokerfuse. “Definitely a promising start as it exceeded the million Guarantee on the Main Event.”
The series appears to have gone down well with the players as well.
“WPTDeepStacks appealed to a wide audience with buy-ins slightly higher than usual which was very exciting for the players to see,” Blum added.
It will be interesting to see if WPT keeps the bigger buy-ins for future events. The higher entry fees are likely to mean tougher fields as regs and pros chase the big pay-outs. But that didn’t seem to put anyone off this time round.
It was certainly a brave move, with PokerStars right in the middle of its SCOOP series and GGPoker at the business end of its Spring Festival. The GGSF turned out to be the second-biggest online series ever, so for WPTDS to clear a $1 million guarantee on the same weekend is no small achievement.
888 Continues to Raise its Profile in 2021
It took just over seven and a half hours for the final table to play out on Day 2 of The Main Event—five hours of which was streamed live on 888’s brand new Twitch.TV channel. Analysis was provided by David Tuchman and Nick Wealthall, with Matt Savage providing color commentary. The stream is still available on 888poker.TV and has already racked up over 2000 views.
The London Online series was not the only WPTDS action happening in April, as 888 ran Italian and Iberian online festivals concurrently. It was the perfect way to promote the roll-out of its revamped Poker 8 software which had launched in those markets earlier in the month. All in all, the three series generated over $3,000,000 between them.
It has been a busy year for 888poker and the operator shows no signs of slowing up. It has just launched a revival of its popular 24/7 Freerolls Festival, which runs until July 18, and will see $100,000 given away in prizes.
The WPTDS will also be returning. Hermance Blum confirmed: “We look forward to coming back with a new WPTDeepStacks Online schedule later this year!”
