Renan Bruschi cemented his standing as Brazil’s most prolific online tournament grinder on September 10, taking down Event #20-High of the 2026 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) on PokerStars for his tenth career WCOOP title. Playing under his long-running screen name “Internett93o,” Bruschi topped the $530 buy-in NLHE Mystery Bounty Wednesday Surprise for a total of $31,686, a milestone score that extends his lead as the winningest Brazilian in the history of PokerStars’ two flagship online series.
A Decade of Dominance Across SCOOP and WCOOP
The victory pushed Bruschi’s combined SCOOP and WCOOP title count to 22, a number no other Brazilian player has come close to matching across the two series’ more than two-decade history. His resume also includes a WSOP bracelet, won in 2021 when he outlasted the field in Event #14: The Big 500 at the GGPoker-hosted WSOP Online for $150,327, giving him credibility across both of the industry’s most prestigious online tournament brands, not just PokerStars’ marquee series.
Event #20-High drew 216 entries to its Mystery Bounty Wednesday Surprise format, a structure that pays part of the prize pool as progressive bounties collected for eliminating opponents, on top of the standard payout for finishing deep in the field. Bruschi’s total score of $31,686 combined $21,200 in bounty collections with a further slice of the base prize pool, a breakdown that speaks to how aggressively he had to play to both survive and hunt bounties across a modern Mystery Bounty structure, formats that reward relentless, well-timed aggression rather than a purely conservative approach.
Gabriel Tavares Adds a Podium of His Own
Bruschi was not the only Brazilian making headlines on the WCOOP leaderboard that week. Gabriel Tavares, who competes for the Samba Poker Team under the screen name “gtavares10,” finished runner-up in Event #15-High, the $10,300 buy-in NLHE Super Tuesday High Roller, for $65,799. Tavares fell just short of the title to Netherlands pro Johannes Straver, known online as “Jepser8,” in a 23-entry field that reflected the sharp, high-stakes end of the WCOOP schedule rather than the high-volume grind of Bruschi’s bounty event.
Tavares has built a reputation in recent seasons as one of the most consistent Brazilian faces in both live and online high-roller fields, a résumé that also includes a podium finish for Brazil at EPT Barcelona earlier this year. His runner-up finish in the Super Tuesday High Roller reinforced that reputation, even as the headline of the week belonged to Bruschi’s milestone tenth title.
Why the Milestone Matters
WCOOP and SCOOP titles carry outsized weight in the online poker world because of how selective the fields have become. Unlike live series, where a hot week can produce several titles for a red-hot recreational player, WCOOP draws the deepest, most specialized online fields of the year, with most numbered events attracting large swaths of full-time grinders and former champions. Reaching double digits in WCOOP titles alone places Bruschi in rarefied territory globally, let alone within Brazil, where PokerStars has become the dominant training ground for a generation of players who later transition to live festivals like BSOP and international high-roller series.
Brazilian players have increasingly used strong WCOOP and SCOOP results as a springboard into live poker, and newcomers looking to follow that path often start by mastering fundamentals such as how to play poker before tackling the more complex bounty and high-roller formats that now dominate the WCOOP schedule.
A Career Built on Volume and Longevity
What separates Bruschi from most online specialists is not a single breakout year but sustained volume across more than a decade of WCOOP and SCOOP fields. He has cashed thousands of times across PokerStars’ major series, a track record that has made him a fixture at the top of Brazilian all-time money lists compiled by tracking sites and forums that follow the country’s online scene. Rather than chasing a handful of marquee high-roller events each series, Bruschi is known for entering a wide spread of buy-in levels and formats, from the $530 Mystery Bounty that produced his tenth WCOOP title to the higher-stakes PLO8 and hold’em events that have padded his SCOOP haul over the years.
That volume-first approach is precisely why Mystery Bounty formats like Event #20-High have become such a good fit for his game. The format’s built-in variance, part of the prize pool locked into bounties that pay out the moment an opponent busts, rewards players comfortable making unconventional, aggressive decisions rather than simply playing a standard survival-focused tournament strategy. Bruschi’s ability to both accumulate bounties and still go on to win the event outright is a testament to a skill set built for exactly this kind of high-pressure, high-variance format.
WCOOP 2026: A Growing Festival
The 2026 edition of WCOOP began on September 6 and runs through September 30, spanning 121 numbered events split across roughly 350 individual tournaments with close to $40 million in total guarantees. Buy-ins range from as little as $5.50 up to $25,000, with the festival’s marquee weekend still to come: six Main Events, worth a combined $6.5 million in guarantees, are scheduled for September 27 and 28, split between No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha championships.
With three weeks of the series still remaining, both Bruschi and Tavares are likely to keep adding to their results, and Brazilian players will be watching closely to see whether Bruschi’s tenth WCOOP title turns into an eleventh, or a twelfth, before the series closes out later this month.
