GGPoker Set New World Record for Online Poker Entries in Ocean KO Event

The Ocean K.O. tournament featured an incredible 420,084 entries on GGPoker this week, breaking an 11-year-old record set on PokerStars in a ‘centroll’ event where players could enter for just a single cent. The entry fee of $5 made it a spectacular event, where the winner, ‘Sange Savachenko’, received $9,152 in bounties and a top prize of over $43,500.

Record Books Updated as GGPoker Eclipse PokerStars

The largest-ever real money online poker tournament was previously held in 2015 on PokerStars. As if to underline just how GGPoker have become the market leader in the game, while the 2015 PokerStars ‘Common Cents’ tournament welcomed 253,692 entries, with Austrian player Simon ‘DaDumon’ Grabenschweiger winning the top prize of $10,000, GG went much bigger.  Their winner, ‘Sange Savachenko’, took home $9,152 in bounties alone, with the tournament top prize of over $43,500 meaning he cashed for a total of $52,665.65.

Across dozens of Day 1 flights, GGPoker’s Ocean K.O. Progressive Knockout (PKO) event saw over 24,000 players reach Day 2 and the money place. Just nine players made Day 2, with ‘Sange Savachenko’ proving victorious as they beat ‘HHHBVVVVBB’ heads-up. With the tournament guaranteeing $1 million, the eventual prize pool exceeded $1.9m.

Of that prize fund, over $1.05m of it was to be paid out in bounties, with the largest one awarded being the $13,356.55 won by the player who eliminated the 370^th place finisher. The format was a unique one, with players shooting for riskier multipliers after winning a bounty, such as the top prize, a 400x multiplier.

The Rise of Bounty Events

Over the last six years since COVID, the rise of bounty poker events has perhaps been the biggest post-pandemic change to the game. While GTO has undoubtedly moved the game on in terms of a skill level, players have a collective penchant for gambling, and while the lotto might be all luck, bounty events hit the sweet spot between supreme skill and fantastic fortune.

In Las Vegas, Mystery Millions events have grown and grown, with players such as Matt Glantz and Roberto Romanello among those to bank either $1m or $500,000 in WSOP bounty events. Given GGPoker bought out the WSOP in February, this won’t change.

The rise of bounty events in poker in general is phenomenal, with online poker now joining live poker in putting more of these events into regular series schedules. The latest is this Ocean K.O. event, and in response to players asking if this sort of event would be repeated, GG confirmed via reply that they would be including a similar event in forthcoming tournament series on the site.

Will this New Record Be Beaten?

Big bounty results from low or even micro level PKO events are going to be commonplace in the future, with GGPoker keen to push to become a market leader in that regard too. Their biggest ever tournament field was the total of 536,941 they welcomed to play a New Year’s Day Freeroll event on the site but that wasn’t real money. Last night’s incredible Ocean K.O. event set the official record for real money tournament entries online.

The event’s structure is an interesting one, with any knockout potentially multiplying the PKO bounty on that player by 400 times. The top win possible last night wasn’t won, but it was $670,000. In September and in Europe, the Winamax player ‘oldepaso68’ banked an amazing €838,000 from one bounty to set the record for a single knockout in online poker.

That time the €100 buy-in Space KO event was the place to be. While the tournament winner earned just €5,000 for taking it down, ‘oldepaso68’ took home enough money to consider not turning up for work in the morning for the next decade. With GGPoker confirming events of this nature will be back very soon, the site’s massive player pool and big guarantees dictate this record might be broken within the next 12 months.