TODAY’S HEADLINES

Unreal! Ferreira makes it four and leads $10K FT
Maiden titles for Clark and Cowen
Two players do the double
RUMUKULUS denies Watson his fourth

BEHIND THE HEADLINES

Fantastic Ferreira continues to dominate, regardless of buy-in: Anyone who says “I can’t win at the low stakes because people don’t respect my raises”, please leave and close the door quietly behind you. And anyone who says “It’s easy to win big buy-in events because there are fewer players”, you’re out of your mind.

Case in point: Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira. The Brazil-based Portuguese has absolutely demolished this year’s WCOOP, regardless of buy-in, field size, or field talent. He’d already won three titles this year before play began yesterday, plus had three runner-up finishes, all of which came in High-tier events.

But last night, Ferreira added a fourth title of 2022 (his sixth overall) and this time it came in the Low. Ferreira took down the $11 6-Max Deep Stack, defeating a massive field of 7,619 to bank $10,590. Remarkable.

And you know what’s crazy? That amount doesn’t even cover his buy-ins in the $10,300 Thursday Thrill PKO, in which Ferreira is chipleading the final table. He’s in that event for two bullets, but already has $37,812 in bounties and $13,756 locked up in prizes. Plus, Ferreira also finished third in the $2,100 NLO8 for $24,781, AND is on the final table of the $1,050 World Championship of NL 2-7 Single Draw, showing that variant doesn’t matter to him either.

He’ll be back on Saturday looking to win his fifth title of the year in the Thrill, but it won’t be easy. The final table also includes Niklas “Lena9002 Astedt, Juan “Malaka$tyle” Pardo, Sami “Lrslzk” Kelopuro, Eelis “EEE27” Parssinen, Dmitry “yurasov1990” Yurasov, and Ole “wizowizo” Schemion, and if you’re telling me winning that event is easy just because there were only 93 entries, again, I repeat, you’re out of your mind.

Maiden titles for Clark and Cowen: Play was paused in the $1,050 6-Max PKO (#73-H) on Wednesday night’s Day 2, but came to a conclusion Thursday evening when high stakes crusher and poker coach Jon “luckyfish89” Clark took down his first WCOOP title.

Clark outlasted the 440-entry field to win $72,615, including $38,882 in bounties. To get the job done he had to defeat Sweden’s “fierrehuve” heads-up, and this was the second runner-up finish for the Swede. They also just missed out on a title in the $1,050 PKO (#75-H), won by fellow Swede “Speedpokah” for $101,009.

Meanwhile, Clark’s fellow Brit, Rob “robc1978” Cowen, was winning his maiden WCOOP title in the $2,100 5-card NLO8. He banked $42,683 for the victory and denied Norway’s Tobias “Senkel92” Leknes his third title of the series (this was Leknes’ fourth runner-up finish this year) and Ferreira his fifth. Cowen has been on extraordinary form of late, particularly in live poker where he’s won an EPT High Roller and WSOP bracelet in the past year.

Leknes still has a great shot at winning that third title of 2022 though. He’s chipleading the $2,100 8-Game final table and is in pole position to win the $41,272 first-place prize.

Double wins for pinguinho and SerVlaMin: Two more players joined the double-winner club last night. Gabriel “pinguinho” Baleeiro had already won an $11 razz title for $1,958 earlier in the series for his first WCOOP victory. Now he’s added a second, winning the $22 5-card NLO8 for $4,631, overcoming 1,402 entries.

The UK’s “SerVlaMin” also did the double. Their first win of the year came in a $109 PKO for $54,292, and they’ve now followed that up with $59,020 won in the $1,050 6-Max, defeating Yuri “theNERDguy” Martins heads-up.

SerVlaMin is also sixth in chips on the aforementioned $10K Thrill final table, making this quite the breakout series for the Brit.

Sturm denies Watson in turbo: Leon Sturm enjoyed his breakout result this past summer when he finished fourth in the World Poker Tour (WPT) Venetian Deep Stack for $327,000. Now Sturm–who plays on PokerStars under the name “RUMUKULUS”–has added his first WCOOP title to his resume.

Sturm came out on top in the $2,100 turbo, outlasting 155 entries to earn himself $64,256. The final table was stacked in this one, with Christoph “WATnlos” Rudolph (6th), Henrik “hhecklen” Hecklen (5th), Rayan “Beriuzy” Chamas (4th), and Simon “C. Darwin2” Mattsson all falling before heads-up play.

That left Sturm to battle it out against one of the best COOP players of all time: Mike “SirWatts” Watson, who was looking for his fourth-career WCOOP title (he also has seven SCOOP titles). But it wasn’t the Canadian’s day and he would settle for the $49,212 runner-up prize.

TODAY’S RESULTS

STAT TRACKER

WCOOP champions have collectively banked more than $11 million now. With Main Event Sunday still to come, we can only guess at how high that amount will be when the series wraps up.

Tournaments completed: 247
Entries: 736,413 (inc. 179,377 re-entries)
Prize pools: $65,370,430
First-place prizes: $11,057,044 (inc. $2,285,738 in bounties)
Tournaments ongoing: 9
Tournaments starting today: 0

Stats refer to completed tournaments only

MULTIPLE CHAMPIONS

The following players have won more than one title during this year’s WCOOP:

FOUR WINS

Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira

THREE WINS

Joao “Naza114” Vieira, Ognjan “cocojamb0” Dimov

TWO WINS

alligator14, Simon “C. Darwin2” Mattsson, “drew.derzh”, Eduardo “Eduardo850” Silva, “gettingpwned”, “nomalice”, Gabriel “pinguinho” Baleeiro, Robin “robinho” Ylitalo, “roo_400”, Benny “RunGodlike” Glaser, Tobias “Senkel92” Leknes, “SerVlaMin”, Ronan “Sw33ney” Sweeney, “T0X16-“.

TWEET OF THE DAY

Gotta give it to Stevan “random.chu” Chew.

me getting drunk and dming every reg that won a flip vs me this wcoop pic.twitter.com/ZtDuthF5jw

— chu (@random_chu) September 22, 2022

COUNTRIES LEADER BOARD

Brazil is now just four titles away from topping last year’s record of 57 wins. We can only imagine they’re going to smash that.

Current standings:

53 titles — Brazil
27 — UK
22 — Austria
14 — Sweden
12 — Norway
11 — Germany
10 — Ukraine
7 — Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Hungary, Romania
5 — Finland, Montenegro
4 — Kazakhstan, Malta, Mexico
3 — Argentina, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland
2 — Andorra, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Morocco, Peru, Switzerland, Uruguay
1 — Armenia, Czech Republic, Indonesia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tunisia, Uzbekistan.

PLAYER OF THE SERIES UPDATE

Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira seems to be running away with the Overall and High leaderboards (plus, he shot into third on the Low), but anything can happen over the final days of the series. Meanwhile, PokerStars Team Pro Sebastian “peace&loove” Huber is up into fifth on the low board.

OVERALL

1 – Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira, Brazil – 1,970 points
2 – Benny “RunGodlike” Glaser, United Kingdom – 1,765
3 – Kelvin “Kelvin_FP:AR” Kerber, Brazil – 1,710
4 – FONBET_RULIT, Montenegro – 1,415
5 – João “Naza114” Vieira, UK – 1,325

Prize: $25,000 to the winner

HIGH

1 – Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira, Brazil – 1,080 points
2 – João “Naza114” Vieira, UK – 875
3 – Simon “C. Darwin2” Mattsson, Sweden – 815
4 – Benny “RunGodlike” Glaser, United Kingdom – 785
5 – Patrick “pads1161” Leonard, UK – 720

Prizes: 1st — $15,000; 2nd — $10,000; 3rd — $5,000

MEDIUM

1 – FONBET_RULIT, Montenegro – 710 points
2 – Tobias “Senkel92” Leknes, Norway – 540
3 – TheDrunkLife, Hungary – 505
4 – Scarmak3r, Slovenia – 490
5 – gettingpwned, Bulgaria – 435

Prizes: 1st — $10,000; 2nd — $7,500; 3rd — $5,000; 4th — $2,500; 5th — $1,500; 6th-10th — $1,000

LOW

1 – Kelvin “Kelvin_FP:AR” Kerber, Brazil – 570
2 – AwadeuS, Thailand – 555 points
3 – Rui “RuiNF” Ferreira, Brazil – 550
4 – ekvilibryst, Ukraine – 535
5 – Sebastian “peace&loove” Huber – 490

Prizes: 1st — $5,000; 2nd — $2,500; 3rd — $1,500; 4th — $1,000; 5th — $500; 6th-10th — $300; 11th-20th — $150

Check out the full WCOOP Leader Board standings.

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