Winamax Player Turns €100 Space KO Into €927K Payday

A €100 online poker tournament with an €80,000 guarantee produced an extraordinary result at the latest Winamax Series, with more than €1 million eventually paid out and one player walking away with almost €928,000.

The tournament used Winamax’s Space KO format, where randomized multipliers can dramatically increase the value of knockout rewards. This time, the mechanic delivered its biggest bounty to date.

The €100 Space KO event took place on September 16 and attracted 1,108 entries. Under a conventional bounty structure, the field would have generated a prize pool of €99,720.

Space KO changed the equation completely.

By the end of the tournament, a total of €1,022,441 had been awarded – more than ten times the amount the same field would normally have produced.

Most of that money ended up in the hands of one player.

Playing under the screen name “oldepaso68,” the eventual champion accumulated an incredible €922,104 in bounties, highlighted by a single knockout worth approximately €838,000.

The regular first-place payout was comparatively modest at just over €5,000. Combined with the bounty haul, however, oldepaso68 finished the tournament with €927,783.

In other words, roughly 90% of all the money awarded in the tournament went to the champion.

The result represents the largest payout ever recorded in a Winamax online MTT and the biggest MTT payout in the Southern European segregated market. Across all games in Winamax history, only two €2 million Expresso jackpots have produced larger individual prizes.

Space KO combines elements of traditional progressive knockout tournaments with the randomized jackpot mechanics familiar from lottery-style Sit & Gos.

Whenever a player eliminates an opponent, the bounty is subjected to a random multiplier ranging from 0.4x to 100x.

Most knockouts produce relatively small multipliers. The 0.4x multiplier appears 60% of the time, while the maximum 100x multiplier is much rarer, occurring approximately once per 1,000 bounty awards.

That small chance can nevertheless become extremely valuable later in a tournament.

Space KO also retains the progressive element of a standard PKO. Half of a collected bounty is paid immediately to the player responsible for the elimination, while the other half increases that player’s own bounty.

As the tournament progresses, bounties can therefore grow substantially – and any knockout can potentially receive one of the format’s largest random multipliers.

Unlike many Mystery Bounty tournaments, players do not have to reach a specific stage before the special prizes become available. Space KO bounty multipliers are active from the opening hand.

Winamax introduced Space KO in December 2024, and the format has already generated several huge prizes.

Before the latest Winamax Series, the largest Space KO bounty had been won by “WildChampion” in January 2025. The player hit a €715,000 bounty and collected €358,000 in total bounty prizes.

Another major result followed in May 2025, when “Queen Peach” landed a €544,000 bounty during a €250 Gravity Space KO event and eventually accumulated almost €600,000 in bounties.

The €838,000 knockout won by oldepaso68 has now comfortably surpassed both.

Space KO has meanwhile become an important part of Winamax’s MTT schedule, appearing regularly in daily tournaments as well as major festivals such as the Winamax Series.

The concept has also started to influence other operators. Betclic has introduced a related format called Smash Knockout, while several other poker networks have been experimenting with different ways of combining progressive and randomized bounty mechanics.

The record payout came during the 46th Winamax Series, held from September 6 to 17.

The festival featured 352 tournaments and advertised €30 million in guarantees. Actual payouts eventually reached €38.3 million, while the series generated more than 2.4 million entries.

Yet one of its most memorable results came from a tournament carrying a relatively modest €80,000 guarantee.

Thanks to Space KO’s jackpot mechanics, a €100 tournament ultimately distributed more than €1 million – and turned one knockout into an €838,000 prize.