Espen Jorstad, a GTO Wizard ambassador since 2023, won WCOOP 02-H, the $1,050 PKO Warm-Up on PokerStars, on Sept. 7. The victory gave him his third World Championship of Online Poker title and paid $33,250.
According to PokerNews, Jorstad played under the alias SamSolverel and outlasted a 154-player field. The payout came in two parts: $14,359 for the win and $18,891 in bounties. The 154 entries built a $154,000 base prize pool before the bounty layer was added.
Jorstad went into heads-up play as the short stack, trailing realsuhisjii by four to one in chips, but a single hand turned the match when his king-queen ran into king-jack and he completed a straight on the river. After that double-up, he took control and sealed the title by three-betting preflop with ace-king, firing all three streets and moving all in after rivering two pair. His opponent called off with a turned two pair of king-seven that had already been outdrawn.
The runner-up banked $22,281. Austria’s Leonard “Grozzorg” Maue finished sixth for $5,759, while Brazil’s Joao “Jbiancolini” Biancolini took eighth for $4,727.
The result added a third WCOOP crown to a resume that already included wins in 2023 and 2024, with a blank 2025 in between. Jorstad’s first two titles came under the name Hymn2Ninkasi: the 2023 $3,150 PKO Sunday Warm-Up, a 132-runner event worth $122,371, and the 2024 $1,050 NLHE Turbo, which drew 161 players and paid $32,459. He is still best known for his 2022 World Series of Poker Main Event victory, when he outlasted 8,663 entries in the $10,000 buy-in championship to win $10 million and become the first Norwegian to claim poker’s biggest title. The 2026 WCOOP runs through Sept. 30, leaving him about three weeks to add to his tally.
