Former SCOOP champion _m0ney2_89 from Belarus took down the flagship Celtic Fortune Main Event of the Irish Open Afterparty last night for $35,525. The high-stakes grinder outlasted a huge field of 5,837 entries to snag one of the biggest payouts of his online poker career.
The prolific PokerStars competitor also enjoyed a massive haul in bounties adding a further $18,929 to their five-figure score. They won their SCOOP title back in 2020 after taking down an £11 NLHE tournament for $25,420 and also finished sixth in the $1,050 Weekly Final of PokerStars’ Stadium Series for a huge payout of $43,807.
Among those who cashed was Team PokerStars Pro and Irish Open regular Adam McKola who won $258 after finishing 566th out of the 831 players who made the money.
The Irish Open Afterparty featured a total prize pool guarantee of $3 million but easily topped that, with more than $3,575,000 awarded in prize money across the nine-day series.
The prize pool for the $109 Celtic Fortune Main Event, which began on Sunday, was $583,700, well over the $500k guarantee. There were also huge fields in the two Spraggy-hosted events which marked the launch of the Afterparty back on April 12: 10,000 for the $75k guaranteed Spraggy’s Mystery Sunday Storm and 5,554 for the $400k guaranteed Mystery Sunday Special. Other tournaments that attracted big turnouts included the $24k guaranteed Mini Fáilte with 6,360 entrants and the $20k guaranteed Mini Banshee Progressive Knockout which had 6,001 entries.
As well as _m0ney2_89, other big Afterparty winners were Renan “rmpkrbr” Martines from Brazil who took down Spraggy’s Mystery Sunday Special for $25,804 and fellow Brazilian Mateus “Mateuslirasjp” Lira who won the two-day $55 “The Craic” NLHE 7-max for $17,847. Players from all over the world competed with champions heralding from locations as far afield as Vietnam – well done, “MonteGrind” – and Kazakhstan-based “eXpaxion”.
The Afterparty ran from April 12 to April 20 and was designed to bring the Irish Open’s unmistakable ‘craic’ to the online PokerStars tables. Much like the live festival, the Irish Open Afterparty featured a wide range of buy-ins to suit players of all kinds.
The live version of Europe’s oldest and biggest poker tournament ended on April 6 at the Royal Dublin Society with more than 32,300 tournament entries across the whole festival. The Irish Open’s first international stop is in Sydney in September, followed by Marrakech in November. The Irish Open will be hosting its debut festival in the USA in 2027.
