Las Vegas, the name that most often comes into our heads when we think of gambling, is home to the world’s largest poker tournament, the World Series of Poker, and drew more than 35,000 tournament players and more than one hundred million dollars in prizes. Another large poker tournament, the World Championship of Online Poker, however is not hosted in Las Vegas, but is operated in San Jose, Costa Rica.

The World Championship of Online Poker is an annual online poker championship hosted by online gambling business, PokerStars.com, and is set to take place in September. It is the fourth annual championship thus far. While the World Championship of Online Poker is small change compared to the World Series of Poker, the amount of money involved in the tournament is nothing to be laughed at. The tournament includes fifteen individual poker events including a final event of no-limit hold ‘em and is expected to draw more than 10,000 players. The prize pool for the final event starts at 2.5 million dollars. The championship playoffs in Las Vegas, in contrast, starts at more than fifty million dollars in prizes.

Even with the large differences in the number of participants and prize money, the World Championship of Online Poker comes in second in size only to the World Series of Poker and is gaining in popularity. While the online tournament is not aiming to compete with the Las Vegas tournament, according to the World Championship of Poker spokesman Nolan Dalla, prize money for the online championship ranked ninth worldwide. "We have an entirely different demographic," Dalla said. "We're attracting a lot of these people who can't travel to Las Vegas."

“The No. 1 attraction is convenience," Dalla added. "It's much more convenient to log on and play from Belgium or Baton Rouge. There's no airfare and no hotel room ... you don't have to get dressed. You don't have to tip the dealer."

Even though there are strong similarities in the way both tournaments are run, there are significant differences as well. Like the World Series of Poker, poker games are held daily and winners of each event receive a gold bracelet. The main differences lie in the cost of the final events, the speed with which the games are played and the audience participating. The online final game costs $2500 as opposed to the final event in Las Vegas which costs $10,000 or more. Also, online games can be played twice as fast as online games and at least forty percent of the players are from outside of the United States. "It has the broadest international spectrum of any major poker tournament because people don't have to travel," Dalla said.