Espen Jorstad has claimed his third WCOOP title, taking down WCOOP 02-H: $1,050 PKO Warm-Up on PokerStars for a combined $33,250. The Norwegian, playing under the screen name "SamSolverel," beat a 154-entry field in one of the opening events of the 2026 World Championship of Online Poker, banking $14,359 in tournament prize money plus $18,891 in bounties.
It is a modest score by the standards of a man who once collected $10,000,000 for winning the WSOP Main Event, but the result matters for a different reason. Jorstad's online record has always been the quieter half of his résumé, and a third WCOOP title — after wins in 2023 and 2024 — puts him in territory very few players occupy. Multi-title WCOOP champions are rare. Three-time champions who also hold a live Main Event bracelet are rarer still.
The Bounty Structure Did the Heavy Lifting
The headline number tells its own story about how modern online poker pays out. Of Jorstad's $33,250, more than 56% came from bounties rather than the standard prize pool. That is a structural feature of progressive knockout events, not an accident, and it changes almost everything about how the tournament should be played.
In a PKO, half of each buy-in goes into the regular prize pool and half goes onto the player's head as a bounty. Every time you eliminate someone, you collect half their bounty in cash immediately and add the other half to your own head. As the tournament progresses, the players who have been winning pots are carrying inflated bounties, which makes them more valuable targets — and which means the chip leader is simultaneously the most dangerous and the most profitable opponent at the table.
The practical consequence is that calling ranges widen dramatically, especially for the covering player. A hand that is a marginal fold against a standard all-in in a classic freezeout becomes a clear call when there is an extra few hundred dollars sitting on the opponent's head. Jorstad's bounty haul suggests he was doing exactly this: taking the thin calls, applying pressure to short stacks, and treating chip accumulation as a route to cash rather than just to ladder position.
Players who want to understand the maths behind those decisions should start with our guide to pot odds and then work through how equity shifts when a portion of the pot is paid out immediately rather than at the end.
Why 154 Entries Is Not a Small Field
A 154-runner event sounds soft next to the four-figure fields in the low tiers of WCOOP. It is not. High-tier WCOOP events at $1,050 are among the toughest tournaments running anywhere in online poker, populated almost exclusively by full-time professionals, solver-drilled regulars, and staked players fired into the series by backing groups.
WCOOP's three-tier format — Low, Medium and High — is designed precisely to separate these pools. The $5.50 and $55 versions of the same event pull recreational players and satellite qualifiers; the $530 and $1,050 versions concentrate the regulars. Winning a High-tier event means beating a field where nearly everyone at the final table has studied the same spots you have.
That context makes Jorstad's win more impressive than the raw prize suggests. It also explains why the money is spread the way it is: in a field of that quality, the edge available from pure hand-reading is thin, and a large share of the profit comes from correctly evaluating bounty-adjusted spots that solvers only recently began modelling well.
The GTO Wizard Connection
Jorstad has been associated with solver software brand GTO Wizard since 2023, when he became the company's first signed pro. He remains with the brand, and the alias "SamSolverel" reads as a fairly direct nod to that relationship.
The pairing is instructive about where high-level poker study has ended up. A decade ago, the sponsored-pro model in poker was almost entirely about operators — sites paid players to wear patches and play visible tables. Now some of the most visible endorsement deals in the game come from training and solver companies, because that is where a serious player's discretionary spend goes. The shift says something about the modern economics of the game: the money is in study tools, not just in seat-filling.
For players interested in that side of the game, our overview of poker strategy covers the fundamentals, while our comparison of cash games vs tournaments explains why solver work transfers differently between the two formats.
What Comes Next in WCOOP 2026
The 2026 WCOOP runs on PokerStars from September 6 through September 30, with roughly $40 million in total guarantees across 350 individual tournaments. Six Main Events converge at the end of the series: three No-Limit Hold'em championships on September 27 at $109, $1,050 and $10,300, followed by three Pot-Limit Omaha Main Events on September 28 at the same three buy-in levels. Together they carry $6.5 million in guarantees.
Jorstad's early win puts him in the Player of the Series conversation before the series is a week old, though with three weeks of events still to run and hundreds of trophies still to award, that leaderboard will change many times over.
What This Means for Players
Three practical takeaways from this result:
PKO events reward aggression, but only calibrated aggression. The temptation after reading about a bounty-heavy score is to call everything. That is not what wins these tournaments. The correct adjustment is a widening of calling ranges when you cover the opponent, and a tightening of your own all-in ranges when you are the one carrying a large bounty and are likely to be called light. The asymmetry matters as much as the aggression.
Tier selection is a real skill. Most recreational players are better off in the Low and Medium tiers, where the fields are larger, softer, and the buy-ins are a fraction of the High tier. The trophies are identical. There is no prestige penalty for winning a $55 event instead of a $1,050 one, and the hourly rate is frequently better. Our bankroll management guide covers how to size series buy-ins sensibly.
Series poker is a marathon. Jorstad won in the second numbered event of a 25-day series. Players who fire indiscriminately across a full WCOOP schedule typically end up volume-fatigued and results-chasing by week three. Picking twenty events you actually want to play beats registering for everything.
For readers looking for tournament action outside the PokerStars ecosystem, our tournaments hub tracks major online series across the industry, and the Americas Cardroom and BetOnline reviews cover two of the larger alternatives for players who cannot access PokerStars in their jurisdiction. Crypto-focused players can compare options through our crypto poker rankings.
The Bigger Picture
What makes Jorstad an interesting case study is the gap between his public profile and his actual playing pattern. He famously skipped a WSOP summer, publicly noting that poker is not everything, and has been selective about his schedule since the 2022 Main Event win. Yet he keeps turning up in online series results — three WCOOP titles and multiple SCOOP titles now — which suggests a player who has optimised for playing well rather than playing constantly.
That is an unfashionable model in an era of grinders posting six-figure annual volume, and it is arguably a healthier one. For anyone building their own poker schedule, it is worth considering that the most consistent tournament results in the modern game increasingly come from players who choose fewer spots and prepare harder for them.