Benny Glaser has extended the most lopsided record in online poker. The British mixed-game specialist won his 17th WCOOP title on PokerStars, taking down WCOOP 44-H: $1,050 8-Game for $21,400 after beating Markus "O.Klunssila" Ristola heads-up.
No other player is close. Glaser's WCOOP haul is the benchmark for the World Championship of Online Poker, and he keeps adding to it in the formats where the population of genuine experts is smallest.
A first in a format he was supposed to already own
The detail that makes this one interesting: despite a decade of mixed-game results, it is Glaser's first-ever WCOOP title in 8-Game specifically.
Eight-game is a rotation of eight variants — three stud games, limit Omaha hi-lo, 2-7 triple draw, limit hold'em, no-limit hold'em and pot-limit Omaha. It is the format that most directly tests breadth rather than depth. A player can be world-class at stud eight-or-better and still bleed money in the no-limit and PLO rounds; a hold'em specialist who dabbles will be picked apart in the draw games.
Glaser has spent his career being the answer to that problem. His live résumé includes multiple WSOP bracelets in Omaha hi-lo and mixed events. His online record is built on the same foundation. That he had never converted an 8-Game WCOOP event before says less about a gap in his game than it does about how thin the fields are and how brutal the variance is when a 200-runner field of specialists meets a format with eight separate skill checks.
Seventeen titles, nine years
Glaser has now won at least one WCOOP title every year since 2018, with the exception of 2024. That consistency is the actual achievement. Plenty of players have run hot for one series; almost nobody sustains it across the better part of a decade in an environment where the solver-driven skill level of the opposition rises every single season.
Some context for the scale of the record:
- Seventeen WCOOP titles across roughly a decade means averaging close to two a year in a series that runs a few weeks annually.
- The comparable SCOOP record sits in the twelve-title range, held by Sweden's Simon "C. Darwin2" Mattsson — and SCOOP runs a similarly sized schedule.
- The 2026 WCOOP schedule features roughly 350 events across September 6–30, with $40 million in combined guarantees, so the opportunity set is larger than it once was. But so is the field quality.
Why the mixed games are where records get made
There is a structural reason Glaser's record looks the way it does, and it is worth understanding if you are choosing which events to play.
No-limit hold'em fields at a major online series routinely run into the thousands. Winning one is a coin-flip sequence with an edge; winning several in a career is normal; winning seventeen is statistically implausible for anyone. Mixed-game fields at the high buy-in level are often 100 to 250 entries. The edge a genuine expert holds over the median entrant is enormous, and the field is small enough for that edge to convert into wins rather than just long-run EV.
That is the arbitrage in modern online poker. The hold'em pools are studied to death. The non-hold'em pools are not, because the study materials barely exist and the games run less often. Anyone willing to put in the work on stud eight-or-better or 2-7 triple draw is competing against a field where a meaningful percentage of entrants are hold'em players taking a shot.
This is also why the 2026 WCOOP schedule's non-hold'em championships — Razz, HORSE, 8-Game and the stud variants — draw disproportionate attention from serious players despite modest prize pools.
What this means for players
Format selection beats field selection. Most players choose tournaments by buy-in and guarantee. The better filter is the gap between your ability and the field's in that specific format. A $109 8-Game event with 150 entrants may be a softer spot than a $22 hold'em event with 4,000.
The learning curve is shorter than it looks. You do not need to master eight games to beat 8-Game. You need to be competent in all eight and strong in two or three. Most recreational entrants are strong in one and lost in five. Our Omaha and Razz-adjacent strategy material covers the non-hold'em fundamentals, and the poker glossary is worth keeping open if the mixed-game terminology is new.
Bankroll requirements differ. Limit-based games have lower variance per hand but longer sessions; big-bet rounds inside a mixed rotation spike the swings unpredictably. If you are moving into mixed games from hold'em tournaments, our bankroll management framework is the place to recalibrate before you start.
Availability is the real constraint. Mixed games run far less frequently than hold'em outside of major series. Players in markets without PokerStars access can find rotating mixed tables and mixed-game tournaments at sites covered in our real money poker rankings — including TigerGaming, which has historically run a broader game spread than most offshore rooms.
The rest of WCOOP 2026
Glaser's win came on September 16, mid-series. WCOOP 2026 runs through September 30, with the six Main Events — carrying $6.5 million in combined guarantees — scheduled for the September 27–28 weekend.
Other titles have already gone to notable names, including Norway's Espen Jorstad, the 2022 WSOP Main Event champion and GTO Wizard ambassador, who won WCOOP 02-H: $1,050 PKO Warm-Up for a combined $33,250 across prize money and bounties — his third career WCOOP title.
Glaser, meanwhile, has two more weeks of schedule to work with, and the remaining calendar contains several of the mixed and non-hold'em championships where his edge is largest. On current form, eighteen is not a question of whether.
The record in perspective
It is worth stating plainly how unusual seventeen titles in a single annual series is. WCOOP has run since 2002. In that time, thousands of professional players have entered it, many of them full-time online tournament specialists with enormous volume. The second-place figure on the all-time WCOOP title list is not close to Glaser's.
Records like this normally belong to an era rather than a person — someone dominates a format for three or four years before the field catches up and the window closes. Glaser's window has stayed open because the formats he plays are structurally resistant to being solved. There is no equivalent of a preflop chart for 2-7 triple draw that a serious portion of the field has memorised. The study infrastructure that flattened no-limit hold'em skill differentials over the past decade simply does not exist for stud eight-or-better.
Whether that remains true is the open question. Solver technology for mixed games has improved, and training content for the non-hold'em variants has slowly started to appear. If the mixed-game pools go the way hold'em did, Glaser's record becomes a historical artefact of a specific period rather than an ongoing streak.
For now, it keeps growing.
For players following the series or planning their own online tournament schedule, our tournaments hub tracks the major series calendars, and cash games vs tournaments explains why series like WCOOP concentrate value into such a narrow window each year.
Results as reported by PokerStars and contemporaneous WCOOP coverage. Prize figures in US dollars.