Stake Poker has rolled out the biggest tournament series in its history: the World KO Championship, a knockout-only festival running June 28 through July 20 with more than $1,000,000 guaranteed. Every event across the 23 days is a bounty format – regular Knockouts, Progressive Knockouts and Mystery Bounties – and the schedule is deliberately built around the summer’s football calendar, with no tournament kicking off while a match is in play.
Small buy-ins, phased Main Event
Buy-ins sit between $5 and $50, keeping the whole series within reach of recreational bankrolls. The centrepiece is a $100,000 Mystery Bounty Main Event with a $20 buy-in, run as a phased tournament: players can fire any Day 1 flight, each flight ends once 15% of the field remains, and a Best Stack Forward rule means only your single deepest stack carries to the July 20 finale. Re-entries are capped at ten per player per event, and daily action is padded out with $10,000 PKOs, Mystery Bounties, Speed Run PKOs and Deepstack Turbos.
Goals that grow the prize pool
The quirk that sets this series apart is the five Bye Day Specials, staged on football rest days – July 8, 12, 13, 16 and 17. Each is a $30 Progressive Knockout whose guarantee climbs by $500 for every goal scored across the World Cup. Stake expects the five combined to clear $705,000, with individual pools landing somewhere between $135,000 and $145,000. A standalone $50 Mystery Bounty Special on July 18 rounds things out with a $20,000 guarantee.
The micro price points and phased Day 1 flights make this an easy series to dip into from across Asia, where late-night grinders can pick a flight around the football rather than the clock. Weighing whether Stake fits your setup? @PAGDaddyBot fields deposit and site-choice questions for APAC players in English, Korean and Thai.
With the knockout stages of the football and a knockout-only poker series landing in the same three weeks, Stake is betting that the crossover crowd sticks around past the final whistle.