For the first time in its history the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker will be played without players from the US market. The site is still running a full slate of tournaments, although the guaranteed prize-pool has been altered accordingly.

The 62 tournaments have a total guaranteed prize-pool of $30 million, which has seen a number of top online tournament players from the US relocate to other parts of the world in order to participate in what is the online poker version of the World Series of Poker.

Even with the effects of Black Friday affecting the guaranteed prize-pool, PokerStars is still guaranteeing a $5 million prize-pool for the 45,000 buy-in Main Event, including a $1 million guaranteed prize to the winner.

Even though the last running of the Full Tilt Poker FTOPS was held sans the US market, Black Friday was so fresh at that time that it’s hard to count the FTOPS XIX as the first online tournament post-Black Friday. The 2011 WCOOP on the other hand has allowed a number of players to relocate, although players still have money locked up on Full Tilt Poker, so in the future (if Full Tilt ever makes restitution of course) the number of US online poker pros living abroad may increase even further.

Stay tuned for more updates from the 2011 PokerStars WCOOP over the next three weeks.

Tags: 1 Million, 30 Million, 5 Million, Black Friday, FTOPS, Full tilt Poker, main event, Money, Poker Pros, PokerStars, Prize Pool, Restitution, Series Of Poker, Slate, WCOOP, World Championship of Online Poker, world series, World Series of Poker

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 9:51 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “First PokerStars WCOOP minus US players underway”

1. Matthew says:

   September 6, 2011 at 1:51 am

   There must be some pretty intense pokerstars lovers to travel to a different country to play lol. I bet if someone were to sign up in a rakefree room they’ll get more use out of it and save money with all the travel expenses. Plus more fish….but hey I guess whatever floats their boat