Ivan Stokes Takes Down World Championship of Online Poker Main Event

The 2023 World Championship of Online Poker $10,300 buy-in no-limit hold’em main event featured a $6,000,000 guarantee. That target was just met, as 600 entries turned out for the massive online tournament which ran from Oct. 1-4 on PokerStars.

This year’s WCOOP main event champion turned out to be poker pro Ivan Stokes. The UK resident, playing as ‘ILS007’, navigated the sizable field and tough final table to secure the title and the top prize of $1,047,257.

Stokes is a co-founder and head coach of training site Poker Detox’s MTT division. His bio on the company’s website notes several prior COOP titles on his resume.

The final day of this four-day tournament began with just nine contenders remaining, each having locked up at least $94,330 for making it thus far.

Several big names fell in the early stages of the final table, including recent
European Poker Tour Barcelona €100,000 high roller winner Kayhan Mokri (9th), 2023 WSOP $10,00 super turbo bounty third-place finisher Kelvin Kerber (7th), 2023 Triton London $50,000 high roller fifth-place finisher Jamil Wakil (6th), and 2022 EPT Barcelona €25,000 high roller champion Leonard Maue (5th).

Sweden’s Niklas Astedt, known online as ‘Lena900’, overtook the chip lead during four-handed play, but he lost a big pot with kings up against a turned straight for Juan Pastorto fall back into second in the counts. He ultimately finished fourth when his pocket kings fell to the flopped set of deuces held by Stokes, with the chips going in on the river. Astedt earned $408,827 for his latest deep run in a big online event. According to PokerStake, Astedt now has nearly $46 million in recorded online tournament earnings, the most of any player in that database.

Stokes continued to pull away from the rest of the pack during three-handed play. The next knockout saw his A-9 win a preflop race against Pastor’s pocket fours to give him
more than a 7.5:1 chip lead over Sweden’s ‘ShipitFTW911’, the only player among the final nine whose real name was not posted by PokerStars. Pastor earned $559,385 as the third-place finisher.

The final hand of the event began with a button min-raise to 1,600,000 from ‘ShipitFTW911’ with 99. Stokes three-bet to 4,400,000 out of the big blind with KK and was called. The flop came down 1076. Stokes led out for 2,970,000 and again was called. The turn brought the 2 and another bet from Stokes, this time to the tune of 4,930,200. ‘ShipitFTW911’ hung around to see the 2 on the river. Stokes moved all-in and ‘ShipitFTW911’ called off their last 12,921,085 to get the bad news. They secured $765,389 as the runner-up finisher.

Here is a look at the payouts awarded at the final table: