The GG Online Championship 2022
When GGPoker launched its inaugural GG Online Championship on May 5, 2022, the pitch was simple and enormous: $150 million guaranteed, spread across 131 events and more than 870 tournaments, with nearly every event offered at up to four buy-in tiers so that a $5 grinder and a $25,000 high roller could chase the same title on the same night. It ran 27 days without pause, and by the time the final hand was dealt on May 31, the number on the board had stopped resembling the one GGPoker promised. The community had won $178,148,382 from 977,493 entries. The series didn’t just clear its guarantee, it lapped it.
The Scoop for Everyone
The structure was the selling point. Rather than pricing amateurs out or boring the professionals, GGPoker built the entire series on tiers, running Low, Medium, High and Super High versions of the same events so that a $5.25 Bounty Hunter and a $5,250 Bounty Hunter played out side by side, each with its own guarantee and its own champion. The result was a field that stretched from all-time greats like Daniel Negreanu down to players sitting in their first online tournament, all chasing the same thing. It was, in the series’ own relentless pun, a month-long invitation to scoop. Day one alone set the tone, four events and nearly $3 million in guarantees, with the first seven-figure prize pool of the series arriving before the opening night was over.
A Month of Milestones
The money arrived in waves. Eleven days in, with 58 events and 172 tournaments already complete, players had banked north of $63 million. By the halfway mark the counter had rolled past $75 million, and with a full weekend still to play it had cleared $165 million and was closing on a figure nobody had dared print at the start. Anchoring the calendar were the giants: the $10,300 Super MILLION$ and its $10 million guarantee, the single biggest tournament of the series, and the $1,500 GGOC Main Event carrying $8 million, each spreading a fortnight of Day 1s so no one had an excuse to miss the final table. Forty of the 131 events guaranteed at least seven figures, and $500,000 in leaderboard bonuses sat on top of it all, divided across the three tiers for the players who kept coming back. Every marquee final played out under the lights of GGPoker.TV, the series’ free stream, where railbirds could watch the Super MILLION$ and the Main Event play down to their closing hands in real time.
The Millionaires Club
For most of the field, the GG Online Championship was a month of chasing. For seven players, it was a month that rewrote the bankroll for good. Each cleared more than a million dollars across the series, led by Ole Schemion’s $2.06 million, the kind of number that would headline most careers, banked here in under four weeks.
| Player | Series Winnings |
|---|---|
| Ole Schemion | $2,064,272 |
| Simon Mattsson | $1,662,716 |
| Rui Ferreira | $1,454,063 |
| A. Martirosian | $1,354,534 |
| Arsenii Malinox | $1,141,690 |
| Samuel Vousden | $1,094,876 |
| Andras Nemeth | $1,041,807 |
Champions of the Leaderboards
That $500,000 in leaderboard money rewarded a different kind of excellence, not the single big score but the grind of showing up day after day. Three tiers produced three champions, and one of them nearly ran the table. Amichai Barer took the combined High and Super High board for T$50,000 and, not satisfied with that, won eight individual titles along the way, more than anyone else in the series. The High tier was the only race with real late drama: week-one leader ‘Wei Zhao’ slid all the way to 124th by the finish, while Barer surged and pulled nearly 200 points clear of Chris Rudolph. The Medium board was never a contest, with Joao Simao seizing the top early and only widening the gap. On the Low tier, ‘goosebumps4’ timed his climb perfectly and grabbed first in the closing week.
| Tier | Champion | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| High / Super High | Amichai Barer | T$50,000 |
| Medium | Joao Simao | T$20,000 |
| Low | ‘goosebumps4’ | T$15,000 |
Records for the Books
A series this size leaves a handful of numbers that deserve their own mention. The biggest field belonged to Event #113-L, a $25 Mystery Bounty that drew a staggering 43,443 entries for a $1,086,075 prize pool. ‘LaPataDonald’ took the title for $35,258, but the biggest single score of that tournament went to ‘PRISt323’, who busted in 4,173rd, barely inside the money, and still walked away with $100,062 on the strength of a bounty run, all from a $25 buy-in. And then there was ‘danludan’, who won neither the most money nor the biggest title, but reached the cashier an almost unbelievable 250 times across the series, the steadiest seat in the house for 27 straight days.
The inaugural GG Online Championship set a bar few online series will ever reach: $178 million paid out, nearly a million entries, and a month of poker that GGPoker’s community would measure the next one against for a long time to come.
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About the Author: Shawn Altbaum has been writing and editing in the online gaming industry since 2007, reporting live from the WSOP Main Event and conducting interviews with professional players. An active poker player, he combines industry expertise with firsthand knowledge of the games he covers. He currently serves as Global Head of Copywriting at NSUS Group, overseeing brand voice and content strategy across GGPoker and GGVegas.
