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Home / News / Winter Series 2021-22: All the stats and stories from the latest blockbuster series

Winter Series is over for another year, and here’s where we take a look at all the stats. We knew before the series even began that there was $50 million in guarantees across the near 300 tournaments, and we obviously went much bigger.

As our stat tracker shows, prize pools topped out at more than $61.7 million, with close to $9 million paid to winners. But it’s those entry statistics that really dazzle. Despite the time of year, when much of the western world is otherwise occupied in visiting family and celebrating, hundreds of thousands of people still played poker on PokerStars.

WINTER SERIES FINAL STAT TRACKER

Tournaments completed: 291
Entries: 1,417,523 (inc. 443,837 re-entries)
Prize pools: $61,741,378
First-place prizes: $8,881,660 (inc. $1,904,028 in bounties)

Click for full Winter Series results

Here’s a quick look at all the most notable moments from the series.

BIGGEST TOURNAMENTS

Winter Series featured a very special edition of the Sunday Million. Its title — the Sunday Two Million — should give you an idea of what was so special about it. That tournament duly eclipsed its $2m guarantee, but it wasn’t the biggest tournament of the series, in terms of prize pool. That went to the high buy-in Main Event, where players competed for their share of $2.145 million. There were six tournaments with more than $1 million in the pool.

Five biggest tournaments (prize pool)

$2,145,000 – 103-H $5,200 NLHE [8-Max, Main Event High]
$2,035,200 – 55-M $215 NLHE [8-Max, Sunday Two Million]
$1,968,000 – 103-M $530 NLHE [8-Max, Main Event Medium]
$1,317,800 – 109 – $109 NLHE [8-Max, Phase]
$1,270,700 – 103-L $55 NLHE [8-Max, Main Event Low]

In terms of entries, we need to look at the lower buy-ins for the very biggest tournaments — and there were seven of them with more than 20,000 entries. The biggest of all came early in the series, when there were 36,898 entries (including 16,721 re-entries) to a $5.50 buy-in hold’em event with a $250K guarantee. Incidentally, that tournament also had the largest number of unique players: 20,177.

Five biggest tournaments (entries)

36,898 – 56 $5.50 NLHE [8-Max, Progressive KO]
29,676 – 102-L $11 NLHE [8-Max, Progressive KO]
25,414 – 103-L $55 NLHE [8-Max, Main Event Low]
23,151 – 09-L $55 NLHE [8-Max, Progressive KO]
21,689 – 61-L $5.50 NLHE [8-Max, Progressive KO]

MULTIPLE CHAMPIONS

Schemion in Winter Series gear

As always during a major series, there was a decent smattering of players who managed to win more than one title. While simple probability makes this a near certainty, it still manages to impress — particularly when you find certain players inevitably making the list. There were another two titles for ever-presents such as Patrick “pads1161” Leonard and Ole “wizowizo” Schemion, while Simon “C. Darwin2” Mattsson won three.

However, hats off to Russia’s “Premove”, who won four tournaments, all before the series even reached its halfway point.

4 titles: Premove (Russia)
3 titles: Simon “C. Darwin2” Mattsson (Sweden)
2 titles: Alex Shepel (Russia), BC1989RF (Hungary), BCE_MOE_05 (Russia), BOLIS_CTBA (Brazil), Camilancefieldg (Canada), kn0wlEdge911 (Malta), Kumarji (Sweden), Lg#born2win (Brazil), magwitch78 (UK), MQTR11 (Slovenia), nb_communist (Russia), NEWFlat (Russia), Sebastian “p0cket00” Sikorski (Canada), Patrick “pads1161” Leonard, Ole “wizowizo” Schemion.

COUNTRIES LEADER BOARD

To the surprise of nobody, the country that provided the most winners during Winter Series was Brazil. In keeping with the South Americans’ dominance in all the ‘COOPs on PokerStars, Brazilians were streets ahead in Winter Series as well, bagging 50 titles. As is also customary, Russia came in second, with 36 titles, and everyone else was a long way back. Canada claimed best-of-the-rest accolades, but Sweden will also be very happy with their haul of 17. In all, 38 countries provided champions, which is on a par with the COOPs.

Final standings:

50 titles – Brazil
36 – Russia
22 – Canada
17 – Sweden
16 – Germany
15 – UK
14 – Romania, Ukraine
10 – Austria
9 – Lithuania
8 – Finland, Ireland
7 – Poland
6 – Czech Republic
5 – Hungary, Malta, Slovenia
4 – Argentina, Belarus, Belgium, Greece, Norway
3 – Bulgaria, Mexico
2 – Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova
1 – Armenia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Peru, Uruguay, Vietnam.

That’s about it for this edition of Winter Series. No doubt it will return next winter, when we can expect much more of the same. In the mean-time, we have SCOOP, TCOOP, WCOOP and Micro Millions, among others, and we’ll be covering all of them on PokerStars Blog too.

Happy New Year!

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