Daily 3-Bet: $90m WCOOP, GPL Brazil, Marooned by KK

The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is a pair of Kings, five aces on the board and steam flying from your ears when the cards go on their afternoon poker news backs.

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Today in the 3-Bet we find the 2017 WCOOP hitting pretty epic numbers, the Global Poker League eyes Brazil and Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine gets aced.

1) 2017 WCOOP Pays Out $90m

Well. That was a huge month for online poker. Despite years of lingering ‘online poker is dead’ whispers this September - with its four major online poker series on PokerStars, 888poker, partypoker and Winamax - was a behemoth.

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That was a big one.

The godfather of online poker series, the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), fittingly led the way with a WCOOP record of $90.6 million in prize pools — up 16.5% from the $77.8 million paid out last year.

It was also the second-largest online poker series ever, behind only this year’s PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), which paid out more than $93 million.

According to Rafi Ashkenazi, CEO of The Stars Group, over 107,000 players took part and of that group 10% were WCOOP first timers.

So, that’s a good sign. If Italy, Spain, France and Portugal pull this shared player pool thing together, too, we could be looking at a record year for online poker in 2018.

With a burgeoning group of competitors in 888poker and partypoker dramatically boosting their efforts, too, it’s a good time to be an online poker player.

Unless, of course …. you know what we’re going to say here. Oh, USA.

2) Global Poker League Coming to Brazil

Despite some really cool moments, Season 1 of the Global Poker League was, by most measures, a bit underwhelming.

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The potential for team poker, great match-ups and loyal fan bases was clearly there but the execution/format didn’t draw in the numbers the GPL (and the poker world) would have liked.

The idea of a poker league, though, still has plenty of legs as the GPL has launched independent GPL India and GPL China in 2017.

Next up in 2018? GPL Brazil, which ESPN Latin America reported on this morning.

Based on the passion of Brazilian poker players and fans we’ve seen time and again - and the success of the Sao Paulo Metropolitans in the inaugural season of GPL Global - we can’t see how it won’t take off.

In addition to GPL Brazil ESPN reported the second season of the ‘GPL Major League’ is still in the works as is an event called GPL All-Star 2018. Check the report (in Portuguese) here.

3) Adam Levine Does Not Like to See Septuple Aces

This is exactly how we feel when our KK gets cracked by 7 aces! (Fast forward to 2:11 to see the ‘hand;’ h/t to Dutch Boyd for the video)

Enjoy the weekend!

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