Swiss player wins TCOOP Main Event and $396,691.43

(PRESS RELEASE) -- Swiss player Dinesh "NastyMinder" Alt was 2016 Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP) Main Event champion at PokerStars.com, pocketing a record TCOOP prize of $396,691.43 following a heads-up deal with "KungKroon" from Sweden.

The first-place prize surpassed the previous largest – won by "Nikki_Hefner" in last year's TCOOP Main Event – by just $175.05.

Alt topped a field of 4,077 players after 5 hours and 34 minutes to win the first major online championship of the year, getting the biggest slice of the $2,711,205 prize pool. The player from Switzerland, who was also the runner-up in TCOOP-11 winning $29,220, finished the series with a total of seven cashes and a sixth-place position on the TCOOP Leader Board. Alt has also previously chopped a Sunday Million in 2014 and was the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour Sydney Main Event winner in 2013.

BIG WINNERS
The final few days of TCOOP threw up a host of other high-profile winners, including Team PokerStars Pro Aditya "Adi Agarwal" Agarwal, who won the $215 NLHE Wrap-Up event for $160,000; Grayson "gray31" Ramage, who walked away with the $2,100 NLHE Turbo High Roller title for $213,867.23 following a four-handed final table deal; and there were second TCOOP titles for "arxigos," "buzzard1881" and "robinho."

TRIPLE COOP
There was one other player who really stood out, with Rui "RuiNF" Ferreira from Czech Republic taking down TCOOP-37 – a $215+R NLHE 6-Max Turbo – for $81,474 on Friday night to become only the third player (after James "Andy McLEOD" Obst and Shawn "buck21" Buchanan) to win the PokerStars Triple COOP (TCOOP, SCOOP, WCOOP titles). Ferreira bested a field of 659 players to add the TCOOP title to the SCOOP Heads-Up High stakes tournament he won in 2014, and the WCOOP victory he secured in a Big Antes event in 2015.

PLAYER OF THE YEAR
The TCOOP 2016 Leader Board winner was "ouchbadbeat" from the U.K., who achieved 16 cashes – three more than anyone else this series – to finish on 340 points. Australia's "ugritaly" and Czech Republic's "Zagalo87" finished tied second on 310 points. For his efforts ‘ouchbadbeat' receives a Champion's Trophy and 2015 SCOOP [H] Main Event ticket, with SCOOP tickets of various denominations awarded to players ranked 2nd-100th on the leaderboard.