button in SafariGGPoker Sets World Record for Largest Poker Tournament of All Time
A new world record for the largest poker tournament of all time has been set on GGPoker, with the $5 Ocean KO Opener attracting 420,084 entries to surpass the previous record of 253,692 participants set by PokerStars in October 2015.
Played across dozens of starting flights, the monster tournament sees a minimum of 24,134 players advance to Day 2, which plays out on Monday, as GGPoker's latest addition to its online schedule comfortably eclipsed the previous benchmark.
The PokerStars record was set in October 2015's 'Common Cents' tournament that was won by Austrian-based player Simon "DaDumon" Grabenschweiger, who turned a one-cent entry into $10,000.
The $5 Ocean KO smashed its original $1 million guarantee, with the remaining players set to battle for a prize pool of over $1.9 million, including a first-place prize of $43,938 and total bounties worth over $1.050 million, given the Progressive Knockout (PKO) format.
Despite its evident popularity among players, the tournament's format has drawn criticism online, with some arguing the addition of random jackpot multipliers of up to 400x in PKO tournaments risks turning online poker into more of a lottery than the traditional tournament formats many players are accustomed to.
Ocean KO's are a new addition to GGPoker, although similar tournaments have already enjoyed phenomenal success on other sites, notably Winamax, where jackpot-style Space KO tournaments are an established part of the online poker offering.
Are Jackpot PKOs the Future of Online Poker?
Given their newfound availability on the world's largest online poker site and popularity elsewhere, the smart money would suggest Jackpot PKOs are the next big thing in online poker.
The appeal is pretty simple. In a regular PKO, bounties grow as players knock each other out, but Jackpot PKOs add random multipliers that can turn an otherwise routine elimination into a lottery-style payday.
In this week's record-breaking Ocean KO tournament, that means a player could knock someone out for a bounty, only for a 400x multiplier to turn it into a six-figure or even seven-figure score.
Just last month, a Winamax player named "oldepaso68" landed a record €838,000 bounty from a single knockout in a €100 Space KO tournament, going on to collect €922,104 in bounties and finish with total winnings of €927,783, despite the regular first-place prize being worth just over €5,000, as reported by PokerFuse.
With GGPoker's enormous player pool and liquidity now behind the format, it's not hard to see the appeal, or to imagine regular seven-figure bounty payouts emerging from tournaments at low or even microstakes buy-ins.
