Doug Polk's $162,951 Win A New Twitch Record
April 12, 2016 1:22 pmOn Sunday, 10th April, Doug Polk entered the $700 Kilimanjaro event on PokerStars, and thirteen hours later eventually managed to top a field of 1,452 players to scoop the tournament’s $162,951 first place prize. In so doing, the US poker pro also entered the record books by becoming the person to win the most amount of money online while streaming live on Twitch.
After gradually navigating his way through the 9-Max Freezeout event, Doug Polk later decided to start streaming the action via his Twitch account, which was an inspired choice without which his win would have gone down as just another impressive score for the 28 year-old pro. Instead, Polk’s victory helped him to wrestle the previous Twitch record from former EPT Champion Rupert Elder, who in 2015 won $124,000 while playing a Sunday Major on the Winning Poker Network’s (WPN).
Back then, Rupert Elder only managed to attract a little over 1,000 viewers to his under rated twitch stream, but this time around Doug Polk succeeded in sharing his experience with 6,887 of his followers. Of course, that figure is significantly lower than the record 37,000 or so Twitch viewers who watched Jason Somerville make the $700 Progressive Super Knockout WCOOP final table last September. Nevertheless, Polk’s traffic was still impressive considering it is a private stream in which viewers are first required to pay a $4.99 subscription fee. According to his Twitch stats, Polk has already attracted a total of 95,953 views to his stream.
Doug Polk started his poker career as a self-described “breakeven rakeback pro”, but by 2013 had evolved into one of the best online cash poker players in the world. He has also achieved success in the live arena, too, having amassed $4,966,669 from live tournaments, including winning the 2014 WSOP $1,000 Turbo No Limit Hold’em event for $251,969. In 2014, Polk achieved his highest score to date after taking down the Las Vegas Super High Roller II for $1,648,350.