WCOOP latest

The PokerStars.com World Championship of Online Poker is now entering week two with loads more action still to come, with 23 events over 18 different forms of poker.

And we’ve already have a star winner, as Greg ‘Fossilman’ Raymer recently took on 772 runners in the $320 rebuy Pot Limit Omaha. Sixteen hours later, Greg was the last man standing, swelling his bankroll by a healthy $168,362.

The World Series of Poker Main Event winner from 2004 has been a busy man, as he added the title after playing in the WSOPE in London and the EPT in Barcelona, all in the space of a couple of weeks.

Curiously, three EPT Season 3 champions also cashed in that WCOOP event: Magnus Peterson (EPT Copenhagen), Thang Duc Nguyen (EPT Baden) and Victoria Coren (EPT London).

A total of $18,500,000 is guaranteed in the WCOOP this year, with first place in the main event likely to exceed one million dollars.

Aside from ‘Fossilman’, another early winner of note was ‘oldskool’ PokerStars player "Donald", who took down the WCOOP deuce to seven triple draw crown (and $32k in the process).

The Sunday Million is suspended during WCOOP season, but the last player to bag that prestigious weekly title was Joey ‘Dynamite321’ Lovelady, from Liverpool, England, who took down the big one earlier this month.

Lovelady, 22, turned $215 into $173,451 by outlasting 6,030 players, to bank the biggest pay-cheque of his short poker career after nearly 10 hours of intense competition.

It was a sweet moment for the consistent Lovelady (an economics graduate from Leeds University), who finished 17th in the same event two weeks earlier.

“Last time I made mistakes when we got near the final table,” he said, “but this time I played well and got lucky. Everyone needs a bit of luck to win a big event like this, but you don’t do it by accident.”