Name: The [insert words here] Championship of Online Poker.
Age: 23.
Appearance: A packed schedule of online poker tournaments at PokerStars (and nothing to do with housing chickens).
Is this where online poker champions are made? Yes. Well, technically speaking, one of the places, but that is certainly the intention. The World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) was created by PokerStars as an online equivalent of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) live series in Las Vegas.
Cashing in on that ‘Moneymaker Boom’, huh? Actually WCOOP was first introduced in 2002, the year before Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main Event and kickstarted the ‘golden age’ of online poker. And let’s not forget it was a PokerStars satellite that sent Chris Moneymaker to the WSOP in the first place.
So it’s the online equivalent of winning a WSOP bracelet? It was, for many years. Up until 2015 WCOOP would even award gold bracelets to winners. Nowadays you can win actual WSOP bracelets online at GGPoker and WSOP Online, while most other operators have huge online series of their own.
The 2025 WSOP had 100 live bracelet events, how many does WCOOP have? When it started in 2002 there were nine events on the week-long schedule; now there are 378 taking place across three and a half weeks.
378? At least tell me they’re cheap to enter? Some are, but that’s not always been the case. When WCOOP was established it was intended to be the top end of the online poker spectrum; all the events would have been considered expensive, including the $1,050 Main Event. It wouldn’t be until 2017 that ‘Low’ versions of events were added to the schedule, with ‘Medium’ versions added a year later. These days almost all tourneys run at three buy-in levels, with buy-ins starting from $5.50 and going all the way up to $25,000.
Doesn’t having so many events undermine the idea of a ‘world champion’? Arguably, sure, though the case could be made that happened when the other COOPs came along.
What other COOPs? WCOOP is great, but only comes along once a year, so PokerStars went on to introduce other series for different times of the year, as well as for different regions. There was the Spring COOP (SCOOP, established 2009), the New Jersey COOP (NJCOOP, est. 2016), the Southern Europe COOP (SECOOP, est. 2018), the Pennsylvania COOP (PACOOP, est. 2019), the Michigan COOP (MICOOP, est. 2021), and so on.
So there’s a ‘World Champion of Pennsylvania’? Well, now you're just being silly. But there is a 'Pennsylvanian Champion', and no, it’s not Taylor Swift.
Would I have heard of any of these world champions? Probably. Many big winners and high rollers have racked up multiple COOP wins over the years, with Benny Glaser, Patrick Leonard and Niklas Astedt each scoring over 20 wins. The likes of Adrian Mateos, Calvin Anderson and Shaun Deeb all have various COOP trophies in the cabinet, too.
That’s a lot of star power, would I have a chance of becoming a poker world champion? You? No, I’ve seen you play, but for everyone else, sure. A lot of the buy-ins are reasonable and there’s a ton of different formats and variants to choose from. Just remember — you might just come up against some major players looking for their next online title.
When’s the next one? WCOOP 2025 starts this Sunday at PokerStars, running through to October 1.
Do say: “I’m the king of the wooooorld!”
Don’t say: (“In $5.50 pot-limit badugi)”
