Espen Jorstad has added a third WCOOP title to his record, taking down WCOOP 02-H: $1,050 PKO Warm-Up from a field of 154 players for a combined $33,250 — $14,359 in regular prize money plus $18,891 accumulated in bounties.
The Norwegian, playing under the alias SamSolverel, completed the win from a four-to-one chip deficit heads-up against Finnish player realsuhisjii. His previous WCOOP titles came in 2023 and 2024, with 2025 the only recent year he has not added one.
Jorstad remains best known for winning the $10,000 Main Event World Championship at the 2022 World Series of Poker — the biggest title in the game — and for becoming GTO Wizard's first sponsored professional in 2023, a role he continues to hold as an ambassador for the solver company.
The bounty split tells the real story
The prize breakdown is worth pausing on: $14,359 for the win, $18,891 in bounties. The bounties were worth more than the tournament prize.
That is not unusual in a progressive knockout, and it illustrates something important about how PKO events actually reward play. In a standard tournament, all the money sits in the payout ladder, and the value of an elimination is purely the chips you acquire and the players you remove from between you and the money. In a PKO, every elimination pays immediately in cash, and half of each bounty collected is added to your own head — so the deeper you run, the more valuable you become as a target.
The structural consequence is that PKO strategy diverges sharply from standard tournament strategy, particularly in calling decisions. A marginal call that is a clear fold for chip EV can be correct once the bounty is priced in — and covering an opponent is the condition that unlocks that value, since you can only collect a bounty you can actually cover.
Getting this wrong in both directions is common. Weaker players call far too wide in bounty spots, treating every bounty as worth more than it is. Players coming from a standard tournament background frequently under-adjust and fold profitable spots. Our poker strategy hub covers bounty-adjusted ranges, and the what is equity and what is pot odds explainers are the foundation for working through the maths.
Jorstad accumulating $18,891 in bounties in a 154-player field means he was eliminating a substantial share of the field — which, in a PKO, is precisely where the edge compounds.
The four-to-one comeback
Heads-up at a four-to-one chip deficit is a roughly 20% equity position before skill is factored in — and in a hyper-structured online final, the deficit is harder to overcome than the raw number suggests because effective stacks are shallow and shove-or-fold dynamics compress the number of decisions available.
Comebacks from that position happen, but they require a specific approach. The short stack in a shallow heads-up match cannot grind — there are not enough hands left before the blinds consume the stack. The correct play is aggressive accumulation with a wide shoving range, accepting high variance because the alternative is a slow certain loss.
This is one of the cleanest applications of ICM thinking in reverse. In a two-handed pot for a title, second place is already locked and the only question is maximising the chance of first. Risk aversion, correct through most of a tournament, is actively wrong here. Our what is ICM explainer covers the framework, and the poker odds calculator is useful for working through shove-fold equities.
Comparable comebacks have been a theme in 2026 — João Simão set a Triton record earlier this year by winning from two big blinds at the Invitational. These runs are memorable precisely because they are rare, and it is worth being clear that survivorship bias is doing a lot of work when we tell these stories. For every four-to-one comeback, there are a great many short stacks who did not get there.
The solver ambassador angle
Jorstad's relationship with GTO Wizard is an interesting piece of poker's recent history in its own right.
He became the solver company's first sponsored professional in 2023, a year after winning the WSOP Main Event. That sponsorship model — a solver platform sponsoring a player rather than a poker room doing so — was novel at the time and reflected a genuine shift in where money and influence sit in the poker ecosystem.
For most of poker's televised era, the patch on a player's shirt belonged to an online room buying visibility. The rise of study tools as a serious commercial category created a second class of sponsor, one selling to players rather than to gamblers. That a Main Event champion's primary affiliation is with a solver company says a good deal about how the modern game is played and who the professional audience actually is.
The underlying debate — whether solver-based study produces better results than exploitative, read-driven play — is genuinely unsettled, and the honest answer is that the two are complementary rather than competing. Solvers establish a baseline that cannot be exploited; exploitative adjustment beats opponents who deviate from it. Strong players do both. Our poker strategy hub covers the distinction, and poker tells and how to bluff cover the read-driven side that solvers do not address.
Where WCOOP 2026 stands
The 2026 World Championship of Online Poker runs from September 6 to 30 on PokerStars' global platform, with 350 events on the schedule.
Six Main Events carry more than $6.5 million in combined guarantees, scheduled for September 27 and 28, with buy-ins running from $5.50 at the low end to $25,000 at the top. The schedule is split into High, Medium and Low tiers so that every championship has a version accessible at each bankroll level.
Championship events run throughout, including a $5,200 NLHE 6-Max Championship, a $215 Women's NLHE Championship on September 20 and a $2,100 8-Game Championship on September 24.
The series is running against a backdrop of significant structural change at PokerStars, which has become a B2B poker network in 2026, with Betfair migrating from iPoker in August and Paddy Power and Sky Poker to follow. Our poker networks page covers what that means for liquidity.
What this means for players
If you play PKOs, study the bounty maths. Jorstad collected more in bounties than in prize money, and that ratio is typical of deep PKO runs. Understanding when a bounty justifies a call is the highest-leverage adjustment available in the format.
Cover, or be covered. You cannot collect a bounty you cannot cover. That makes chip accumulation more valuable in PKOs than in standard tournaments, and it is a genuine reason to take marginal spots earlier than you otherwise would.
On short-stack heads-up play: risk aversion is wrong when second place is locked. If you find yourself four-to-one down for a title, play to win rather than to survive — the maths supports it.
On the solver question: treat GTO as a baseline, not a destination. Our poker strategy material covers both sides, and Texas Hold'em and poker hand rankings are the right foundation before any solver work.
If you want WCOOP action: the Main Events run September 27 and 28 with a tiered structure, and satellite routes make the higher tiers reachable. Our tournaments rankings cover the wider September calendar, and bankroll management covers budgeting a satellite campaign.
For players who cannot access PokerStars: availability varies by jurisdiction. Our US, Canada and UK pages set out what is available where, and reviews of Americas Cardroom, BetOnline and Black Chip Poker cover alternatives running substantial PKO schedules. Safe poker sites covers what to check before depositing.