Part of the ongoing GG World Festival, GGPoker’s $300 million guaranteed series running through June 9, 2026, the $1,500 buy-in GG World Championship event produced one of the more unusual final table outcomes of the entire festival: three players who all became millionaires before the tournament was technically over.
A field that blew past its own guarantee
According to PokerNews’ coverage of the event, the tournament drew 7,309 entrants across multiple starting flights, generating a prize pool of $10,415,325, comfortably clearing its own $10 million guarantee. The minimum cash for reaching the final table alone was $174,213, giving a sense of how top heavy the payout structure was even before the final negotiations began.
The three way deal
Once the field was down to its final three players, “filthiest” from Ukraine, Max Rotko from Finland, and “Lord Given” from Serbia negotiated a settlement rather than playing the remainder out for winner take most stakes. The agreed numbers were close enough to reflect a genuinely even three way deal rather than one player conceding a large edge: “filthiest” locked up $1,109,637, Rotko took $1,094,691, and Lord Given secured $1,091,345. Play then continued for the title itself, with Lord Given going on to win the resulting heads up match against Rotko.
The staking angle that made this bigger than three winners
One detail from the final table extended the payday beyond the three players actually seated. Elias Suhonen had purchased 10 percent of Max Rotko’s action through GGPoker’s built in staking software, a feature that lets players buy and sell pieces of each other’s tournament entries directly through the platform rather than relying on outside forums or private arrangements. That stake alone earned Suhonen $109,469 without him playing a single hand of the tournament himself, a reminder that deep runs in large field events like this one routinely create paydays for backers sitting well outside the money the public leaderboard actually shows.
Why deals like this happen at this stage
A three way deal of this kind is a rational response to the shape of the remaining pay jumps rather than a sign that any of the three players lacked confidence in their own play. Once the gap between first and third narrows relative to the variance of playing three handed poker for the difference, locking in a guaranteed seven figure result for all three players and letting only the title itself remain contested is a common and, in a spot like this, mathematically defensible way to close out a tournament of this size.