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Although the seventh day of action at the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker only included two events compared to the normal four or five, Event 19 – the $100 NLHE with a guaranteed $800k prize pool – gave rail birds plenty to cheer about. With a low buy-in of just $100+$9, Event 19 attracted a huge crowd of 11,741. A resulting prize pool of nearly $1.2 million easily topped the guarantee and the race was on for the $163k grand prize.

A few members of Team PokerStars Pro managed to cash in the event, including Pierre “Zoutechamp” Neuville, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier and Fatima Moreira De Melo. The latter player was the only PokerStars Pro to advance to the meaningful stages of the event. She won $1,820 after hitting the rail in 49th place. Grospellier has been very successful in the WCOOP overall, cashing in four separate events so far.

After a grueling 15 hours had passed, you’d think the event would have finally played to completion. In reality, the final table was just starting and it would take another 3 hours before a winner was declared.

The first final table eliminations belonged to BANTEX, Merk2517, spel91 and maxover, who earned prizes between $7.4k and $35k for their efforts. Daskalos20, a native of Cyprus, was next to face the rail. His 5th place finish was slightly disappointing given the fact that he entered final table play with a healthy chip lead.

After two more eliminations, heads-up play commenced between dreeniee82 and erickie, who held chip stacks of 55.3 million and 62.1 million, respectively. After completing two pair on the flop, erickie held strong through the turn and river to topple dreeniee82′s single pair. Dreeniee82 received $117k for his second-place finish.