PokerStars Reschedules Six WCOOP Main Events for Nov. 5
As we reported yesterday, Sunday was supposed to be a massive day at PokerStars with the online poker room hosting many big 2022 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) events including the six Main Events. All six events were canceled after many players disconnected.
PokerStars confirmed that the disconnections were due to a DDOS attack and shared that the three no-limit hold'em and the three pot-limit Omaha WCOOP Main Events are now rescheduled for the weekend of Nov. 5. The online poker room also mentioned that no personal information was leaked during the attack and that players competing in the Monthly Poker Challenge that were affected by the outage will be compensated.
Recent site outages on PokerStars were due to DDoS attacks, but we can confirm that all accounts are safe and personal information is secure. The WCOOP Main Event and Sunday Million will now run on the weekend of November 5. 1/2
— PokerStars Support (@StarsSupport) September 26, 2022
Details Still to Come
PokerStars has yet to announce any details via social media and on the PokerStars Blog outside that, the WCOOP Main Events and WCOOP Sunday Million will still run this year on the weekend of Nov. 5. In other words, we will have six WCOOP Main Event champions in 2022 assuming nothing else goes wrong.
Players playing at the Southern European PokerStars client that primarily services players in France, Portugal, and Spain will not have similar good news as the Galactic Series Main Event will not be rescheduled.
We have a great track record of keeping our platform operational, however we know how frustrating it can be to experience this kind of disruption, especially during our WCOOP and Galactic series. We’d like to apologise to everyone affected and thank them for their patience.
We are not going to let these actions prevent us from crowning 2022 WCOOP Main Event Champions and are now planning to run the Main Events on the weekend of November 5. There WILL be champions in 2022!
PokerStars Blog
More details are unknown at this time including the time, structure, and guarantees. One can assume that PokerStars will run an aggressive satellite and promotional campaign considering that previous satellite and other WCOOP Main Event ticket winners already used their seats in the canceled event.
Also, this means that the four WCOOP Player of the Year Leaderboards, which will award $100,000 to the best performing players, are on hold until at least the beginning of November. Brazilian poker grinder Rui "RuiNF" Ferreira currently leads the overall leaderboard followed by Benny "RunGodlike" Glaser, and Kelvin "kelvin_fp:ar" Kerber.
Rescheduled 2022 WCOOP Main Events
| WCOOP Main Event | Buy-in | Guarantee |
|---|---|---|
| #92-L: NLHE Main Event | $109 | $2,500,000 |
| #92-M: NLHE Main Event | $1,050 | $4,000,000 |
| #92-H: NLHE Main Event | $10,300 | $6,000,000 |
| #94-L: PLO Main Event | $109 | $250,000 |
| #94-M: PLO Main Event | $1,050 | $600,000 |
| #94-H: PLO Main Event | $10,300 | $1,000,000 |
The guarantees listed were the ones on offer for the original WCOOP Main Events scheduled to begin on Sunday, Sept. 25. It is within the realm of possibility that PokerStars could change the guarantees down the road. Stay tuned as PokerListings will update further as soon as more information is available.
*Any mention of a bonus or discussion of such terms is not in relation to the province of Ontario.
*Image courtesy of Rational Intellectual Holdings Limited photographer Danny Maxwell
