High-Stakes Online Poker: $51,000 Buy-In Tournament and Historical Records

A two-day NLHE tournament with a $51,000 buy-in will start on September 20th at 19:30 Moscow time. The final table of the tournament will be played on September 21st. The guarantee for the event is $1,000,000.

The most expensive tournaments on PokerStars WCOOP and SCOOP series before this were head-to-head events with a $25,000 buy-in. The last $25,000 buy-in tournament was held in May 2011 and was won by Bertrand Grospellier. The first such tournament in the WCOOP series in the fall of 2008 gathered 64 players and was won by Steven 'stevesbets' Jacobs. In 2009, the first place was taken by Jonathan Jaffe. In the same year, such a tournament was held for the first time at the SCOOP series, won by Benny Spindler, and the next year by Mikael Tureniec.

After the failure of 2011 on WCOOP, the buy-in was reduced to $10,300, and from 2012 on SCOOP, tournaments with a $21,000 buy-in began to be held. The first online tournament with a $25,000 buy-in was held by Full Tilt Poker in May 2008 and gathered 64 players. Among the participants were Alexander Kostritsin and Sergey Rybachenko from Russia, both of whom lost in the first round. Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen played against young online players Emil Patel and Jason Rosenkranz in the first round. David Oppenheim won his match against The Grinder.