GGPOKER

Before the World Festival was the World Festival, it went by other names. The spring series that began in 2018 as the Good Game Series had been rebranded almost every year since, and in 2023 it finally arrived at the title it would keep. GGPoker called the inaugural GG World Festival “one universal experience across four tiers,” put $200,000,000 behind it, and ran it from May 1 through June 6.

It was the smallest of the three World Festivals GGPoker would go on to stage. It did not feel small.

A Guarantee Beaten by Forty Million

The promise was $200 million. The payout was a good deal larger. By the time the last table broke on June 6, the festival had awarded $239,143,262 across 1,022 tournaments, with 3,042,228 entries pouring through four buy-in tiers that ran from a few dollars to the nosebleeds. More than forty of those events guaranteed at least a million on their own, and the opening seventy-two hours alone pushed north of $20 million into players’ accounts before the festival had properly found its feet.

The grand opening set the tone: a $5 Global MILLION$ Mystery Bounty, the first five-dollar tournament GGPoker had ever backed with a seven-figure guarantee, with a top envelope of $100,000 waiting somewhere in the field.

The Super MILLION$ Sundays

The prestige lived at the top, in the $10,300 Super MILLION$ High Rollers that headlined the Super tier each Sunday. Ognyan Dimov took the biggest of them on May 14, turning a 228-entry field and a $2.28 million pool into $460,973.19, the largest winner’s check of the festival. A week later Jo Jouhkimainen won his own Super MILLION$ for $438,733.27, and the Estonian high-stakes crowd left fingerprints all over the Super tier the whole month.

Above all of them sat Niklas Astedt. The GGPoker Team pro took the lead on the Super High leaderboard early and never gave it back, finishing more than 700 points clear of the field to bank the C$30,000 top prize, with Matthew Stumpf and R Romanovskyi trailing behind. Consistency at that altitude, across five weeks, is its own kind of dominance. Each of the four tiers carried a season-long leaderboard worth $100,000, so the festival rewarded the grind of showing up every night as richly as it rewarded any single deep run.

Small Buy-In, Enormous Envelope

The festival’s best stories, as ever, came from the mystery bounties, where the money has nothing to do with how far you last. In one $54 Saturday Secret KO, ‘Tracyan’ busted in 176th for $294 in prize money and then opened $49,054 in bounties. Deeper into the schedule, a Low-tier player under the name ‘MariaShovaTodas’ went out 785th, collected all of $39, and drew the $25,000 top envelope. Neither came close to a final table. Both went home changed.

The standard bounties ran hot too. In a $10,300 Thursday Throwdown, ‘Gavin Cochrane’ added $136,406 in knockouts to an $85,272 first prize, and in the $525 Bounty Hunters High Rollers, Brazil’s ‘Gabriel Moura’ cleared $92,110 plus another $89,452 in bounties out of a field of nearly four thousand. On May 14 alone, ‘Kris_Petrova’ beat nearly 3,500 entries in the $525 Bounty Hunters High Rollers for $181,752, close to $99,000 of it in bounties. Week after week, the $54 Bounty Hunters Sunday Main Event drew fields north of fifteen thousand, proof that the format’s pull ran the length of the buy-in ladder.

The microFestival

When the main event wrapped, GGPoker ran it back in miniature. The microFestival, every buy-in $25 or under, guaranteed $10 million across nearly 500 tournaments and paid out $12.3 million to something close to two million entries.

Its headline act was a $10.80 Mystery Bounty Main Event that drew a scarcely believable 123,802 players and built a $1.27 million pool. ‘Sickovic’ won it for $40,107, but the richest payday belonged to ‘BusOrTrain,’ who busted in 693rd and unwrapped $79,026. The micro Global MILLION$, a $5 tournament, pulled in 89,494 entrants of its own. The envelopes did their work at these stakes too: ‘Kingcobra398’ turned a 151st-place finish into a $10,003 bounty in one Saturday event, and ‘StajeLjubav’ found $10,000 from 302nd in another. The little series had learned the big one’s best trick.

 

The Marquee Results

The events and scores that defined the 2023 festival, at a glance:

Event	Buy-in	Entries	Winner	Top Prize
Super MILLION$ High Roller (May 14)	$10,300	228	Ognyan Dimov	$460,973.19
Super MILLION$ High Roller (May 21)	$10,300	217	Jo Jouhkimainen	$438,733.27
Bounty Hunters HR Main Event (May 14)	$525	3,498	‘Kris_Petrova’	$181,752.20 (incl. $98,673 bounty)
GGMasters High Rollers World Festival	$1,050	1,067	‘buen juego’	$148,288.33
Bounty Hunters HR Main Event (May 28)	$525	3,911	‘Gabriel Moura’	$92,110.12 (+$89,452 bounty)
Thursday Throwdown	$10,300	92	‘Gavin Cochrane’	$85,272.82 (+$136,406 bounty)
Saturday Secret KO [Mystery Bounty]	$54	4,986	‘Malamut8’	$33,361.86 (top bounty $50,802)
microFestival Mystery Bounty Main Event	$10.80	123,802	‘Sickovic’	$40,107.80 (top bounty $79,026)
micro Global MILLION$	$5	89,494	‘Lecheero’ (deal)	$21,665.02

For a first edition, it set a high bar, and GGPoker spent the next two years clearing it. The World Festival would get bigger. It would rarely get a better story than a player finishing 693rd out of a hundred thousand and walking away the richest in the room.

 

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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.