It is fair to say Brazil's Fabiano "Kovalski1" Kovalski is in red hot form. Kovalski shoned brightly on Day 9 of the 2021 World Championship Of Online Poker (WCOOP), finishing top of the tree going into the final table of a $2,100 buy-in event on the same evening that he finished fifth in the $25,000 Super High Roller for $236,959.
Almost a dozen PokerStars players became WCOOP champions, including Hungary's "kZhh" who took down the aforementioned $25,000 Super High Roller for a cool $657,557.
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Some 79 players returned to the PokerStars tables for Day 2 of the WCOOP-34-M: $2,100 NLHE [8-Max] and only nine of them made it through to the star-studded final table. Nobody at the final table has more chips than Fabiano "Kovalski1" Kovalski, who bagged up an impressive 14,401,864 stack.
Second-placed "3Dtemujin" is the only other player with an eight-figure stack at the restart; the player from Kazakhstan sits back down with 11,217,860 chips.
All eyes will be on Team PokerStars' Lex Veldhuis, who is armed with 4,838,696 chips, enough for fifth place when play resumes. Veldhuis recently spoke to PokerNews about how much it would mean to finally win a WCOOP event and a six-figure score. Finishing in the top three achieves one of those goals for the popular Dutchman.
Play resumes at 1:05 p.m. ET on August 31 where one lucky player will pad their PokerStars bankroll with $214,339.
WCOOP-34-M: $2,100 NLHE [8-Max] Final Table Chip Counts
"kZhh" Denies Chris "ImDaNuts" Oliver Third WCOOP Title
While Kovalski was busy climbing to the top of the chip counts in WCOOP-34-M: $2,100 NLHE [8-Max], he was also butting heads with some of poker's greats in the huge WCOOP-34-H: $25,000 Super High Roller.
Kovalski headed into the final day with the chip lead, and was going great guns at the final table after Pedro "PaDiLhA SP" Padilha, "CrazyLissy," and Justin "ZeeJustin" Bonomo crashed out.
The hot-running Brazilian crashed out when his pocket nines ran into the pocket tens of "kZhh" of Hungary. That hand pushed kZhh's stack north of 13 million, and they used that platform to become a WCOOP champion.
kZhh dispatched Adrian Mateos in fourth, and "spaise411" in third, to take a three-to-one chip lead into the heads-up clash against two-time WCOOP champion Chris "ImDaNuts" Oliver.
The gap in chips proved too much for Oliver to bridge and he had to make do with a runner-up finish and $509,470 in prize money. The champion secured a $657,557 top prize, plus bragging rights.
2021 WCOOP-34-H: $25,000 Super High Roller Final Table Results
Eleven more PokerStars players can now call themselves WCOP champions after securing titles on August 30. Dzmitry "Colisea" Urbanovich was one such player who is a 2021 WCOOP champion after he bulldozed his way to victory in WCOOP-32-H: $1,050 NLHE. The victory came with $77,614 in prize money.
Several WCOOP events see their champions crowned on August 31, including the WCOOP #38-H: $2,100 NLHE [6-Max, Progressive KO], $500K Gtd where Uruguay's Francisco "Tomatee" Benitez leads the final 20 players into battle. First place is worth almost $53,000 plus probably the same, if not more, in bounty payments.
WCOOP #34-L: $215 NLHE [8-Max Sunday Million SE], $1.25M Gtd
