GGPoker’s $5 Ocean KO Opener Sets 420,084-Entry Online Poker Record
Ukraine’s Sange Savchenko won the inaugural jackpot PKO tournament after its field surpassed PokerStars’ 2015 benchmark by about 66%.
- The $5 Ocean KO Opener drew 420,084 entries and generated a $1.93 million prize pool.
- Its field exceeded PokerStars’ 2015 record by 166,392 entries.
- Sange Savchenko won $52,665 plus $9,152 in bounties after beating “HHHBVVVVBB” heads up.
- Ocean KO combines progressive knockout bounties with random Bounty Wheel multipliers and a 14-tier progression system.
GGPoker’s $5 Ocean KO Opener drew 420,084 entries, setting a new record for the largest online poker tournament field. The event produced a $1.93 million prize pool, nearly doubling its $1 million guarantee.
The total beat the previous 253,692-entry benchmark set by PokerStars’ Common Cents tournament in October 2015 by 166,392 entries, or about 65.6%. Sources differ slightly on the old PokerStars total: Guinness World Records lists 253,692 participants, while PokerStars’ original report listed 253,698 entries.
The record field was built across multiple starting flights. One flight hit its 10,000-player cap on Oct. 11, and 24,134 players advanced to Day 2 before the tournament was reduced to a nine-handed final table.
Ukraine’s Sange Savchenko won the inaugural Ocean KO Opener after defeating China’s “HHHBVVVVBB” heads up. Savchenko collected $52,665 in prize money and $9,152 in bounties. Earlier PokerNews coverage listed a $43,938 first-place prize and more than $1.05 million allocated to bounty rewards.
The event was part of GGPoker’s Bounty Hunters Series and used the operator’s new Ocean KO format. As covered earlier this month, GGPoker launched Ocean KO on Oct. 2, and its first three tournaments had already generated more than 30,000 entries and $1.4 million in prize pools.
Ocean KO is a jackpot-style version of a Progressive Knockout tournament. Each elimination triggers a Bounty Wheel that applies a random multiplier to the eliminated player’s full bounty, with multipliers from 0.4x to 400x across the first 10 tiers.
Half of the resulting bounty reward is paid in cash and the other half is added to the winner’s own bounty. The format has 14 progression tiers, from Egg to Legendary Shark; players enter the four Legendary tiers once their bounty exceeds 50 times the buy-in. GGPoker says a single top-tier bounty can reach $1.5 million.
The jackpot element has prompted competing views of the format. Critics argue that large random multipliers can make poker resemble a lottery, while supporters argue that the potential jackpots can attract recreational and new players. GGPoker says most spins land at 1x or below, and unawarded bounty value from sub-1x results remains in the bounty pool to fund larger prizes over time.
