GGPoker Sets Record For Largest Poker Tournament Ever
GGPoker has set a new world record for the largest poker tournament of all time, with its $5 Ocean KO Opener attracting 420,084 entries to surpass the previous record of 253,692 participants set by PokerStars in October 2015, according to PokerNews.
The tournament was played across dozens of starting flights, with a minimum of 24,134 players advancing to Day 2, which plays out on the Monday following the final flight.
The previous record, PokerStars' "Common Cents" tournament, was won by Austrian-based player Simon "DaDumon" Grabenschweiger, who turned a one-cent entry into $10,000.
A Guarantee Smashed Many Times Over
GGPoker's $5 Ocean KO Opener carried an original guarantee of $1 million, a figure the field's size blew past many times over.
The remaining players are competing for a prize pool of more than $1.9 million, including a first-place prize of $43,938 and total bounties worth over $1.05 million under the tournament's Progressive Knockout (PKO) format, which pays players cash for every opponent they eliminate on top of standard payouts.
The record-breaking turnout reflects both the $5 buy-in's accessibility and the pull of the PKO structure, which rewards aggressive play and knockouts rather than purely deep-stacked survival, a format that has proven popular with recreational players chasing bounty cash alongside the main prize pool.
Beating An 11-Year-Old Record
PokerStars' 2015 record stood for more than a decade, a reflection of how large an online poker field needs to be to set a Guinness-level benchmark and how rarely operators have mounted a serious challenge to it.
GGPoker's $5 buy-in point was deliberately low to maximise the possible field size, a strategy that paid off with an entry count nearly 66% larger than the previous record.
The result cements GGPoker's standing as one of the largest online poker platforms by volume, a reputation GDC readers can explore further via the site's wider gambling news coverage and responsible play resources on the responsible gambling hub.
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Why Low Buy-Ins Break Records
Guinness-level participation records in poker almost always come from low buy-in events rather than high-stakes tournaments, since a $5 entry fee removes the main barrier that keeps casual players out of a $1,000 or $10,000 buy-in field. PokerStars' 2015 record came from a one-cent entry event for the same reason.
GGPoker's $5 price point struck a balance between keeping the field genuinely mass-market and still generating a meaningful prize pool once hundreds of thousands of entries were combined, a formula that pushed the final numbers well past both the previous record and the tournament's own original guarantee.
