WSOP THE 57TH ANNUAL WORLD SERIES OF POKER GETS UNDERWAY TODAY
Seth Palansky in particular, got a lot of unwarranted hate back in the day. Working directly for the WSOP did give me a great appreciation for the importance of logistics which were often lost on the larger poker community. When you later worked on the official WSOP side, how did your understanding of the event change?
As the official live reporting partner, we go all-in on coverage of poker’s most famous tournament, from Day 1 flights to the final river card of the heads-up duel. And this year, with a bit of help from the new WSOP+ app, fans can expect fewer mystery players, fewer misspellings, and (finally!) an end to the reign of “Opponent” in hand histories. This will be the eighth time that a WSOP main event champion has earned an eight-figure payday after coming away with the hardware. The past four main events have set a new standard for the tournament, with the 2023 version breaking a 17-year streak for the 2006 main event (8,773 entries) atop the event’s field-size rankings. Winning the historic 2023 WSOP Main Event, American professional poker player Daniel Weinman took home the record-breaking $12,100,000 top prize and his second career WSOP bracelet. The official home of the WSOP, poker players can find the Poker Hall of Fame within the Horseshoe, just outside of the WSOP Hall of Fame Poker Room.
Hachem and Brunson remain in contention to make history as the younger half of a father-and-son WSOP main event championship combo, with Joe Hachem having won in 2005 and the late Doyle Brunson in 1976 and 1977. I also care less about the pay jumps than most, and I’m trying to win the tournament no matter what day it is. Trayner also took down the return of the Aussie Millions main event earlier this year. One of them will eventually hoist this year’s championship gold bracelet, and bank the $10,000,000 first-place prize from the fourth-largest world championship in history. Stream live NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, college sports, plus SportsCenter, First Take, and all your favorite ESPN shows—anytime, anywhere—only in the ESPN app. If you’re a poker fan, there’s no bigger tournament than this.
Daniel and Amanda Negreanu posing with WSOP bracelet number eight. Las Vegas, Nevada (July 6, 2026) – Now well within the initial days of the 2026 WSOP Main Event, the excitement and pressure have kicked up a notch here at the Las Vegas Paris and Horseshoe. Players should follow @WSOP on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram or check WSOP.com for more event news and updates. Before all eyes turn to the 2026 WSOP Main Event, get caught up on all that has unfolded these past few days at the WSOP. Greg Mueller of White Rock, British Columbia, made a magical run in this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event after the longtime pro burned out on the game. After six hours of action in the World Series of Poker Main Event at Horseshoe Events Center, play was halted with Lucas Jumalon maintaining the chip lead.
Watch fun and exciting live poker streams from Global Poker. Watch poker live streams on PokerStars, the world’s premier poker destination. Follow along with the APT live stream all day long! Phil Hellmuth has the most bracelets of all-time, having won 17 between 1989 and 2024.
🎤🔥@brucebuffer just delivered a “Shuffle up and deal! But a late dip puts him in a perilous position heading into Tuesday afternoon’s session. He’ll take 106,500,000 into night two of this three-day marathon. The 22-year-old bagged up 212,000,000 to remain the favorite to walk away with the championship bracelet and the first-place prize of $10,000,000.
A thrilling day of action concluded Day 3 of the 2026 Main Event at the World Series of Poker, with Sasha Liu the clear chip leader at the close of play. He played his first hand of poker in 2017 and immediately fell in love with the game. Stay tuned for the full schedule to see the complete list of events and buy-ins. To qualify online for WSOP 2026, please visit GGPoker to find out more about WSOP Express, or wsoponline.com if located in the United States. These progress into a $2 buy-in (or Step 2 ticket) Spin & Gold 6-Max SNG, then a $10 buy-in (or Step 3) Turbo Tournament, before a $150 buy-in (or Step 4 ticket) regular tournament opens the door for a WSOP bracelet pass.
Fan favorites, including the Mystery Millions, Millionaire Maker, and the Senior’s Championship, are set to return to the schedule along with some new, exciting tournament formats. Defending champion Junjie He won’t be defending his crown after starting the day with 88,500 and hitting the rail before night’s end. Two of the biggest names in the field to start Wednesday saw their days end surprisingly quickly. 2023 APT Taipei Main Event champion Punnat Punsri will join the Day 3 field from the Natural8 ‘Onlive’ flight with 492,000. Other notables moving on include Bin Duan, whose career-best cash of $351,000 came here in South Korea in a 2025 Triton event. Haohui Ma had an eventful couple of levels, starting with a dramatic double-up when he got his pocket kings in against Tomoya Kojima’s aces and drilled a two-outer on the river.
A high roller event with a format that encourages exciting poker action! Under the tutelage of five-time WSOP bracelet winner Kristen Foxen, Philip Chun won his first WSOP bracelet and turned his $550 buy-in into $400,000. There are many storylines to follow this summer, starting with Seiver, who won three bracelets last year. The 56th annual poker extravaganza kicked off with the $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em Mystery Millions event. Winning a WSOP bracelet within two days, Myles Mullaly goes on a heater and pulls off a heads-up comeback against Pete Chen to win his first WSOP bracelet.
Benny Glaser shined brightly early on, and just past the halfway point of the summer, won his third bracelet of 2025. The story of the summer of 2025 felt like it changed a half-dozen times over the course of seven weeks at last year’s WSOP. Local time, opening the gold bracelet action in Las Vegas, and the next four starting flights roll out at 10 a.m. After kicking off the 2025 WSOP with the $1,000 Mystery Millions no-limit hold’em mystery bounty event, the opening event’s buy-in was cut in half. Before a single hand of poker has been dealt in Las Vegas, there’s been a significant amount of concern, conversation, and discussion stemming from new rules and regulations put into place by tournament officials. This was his largest tournament score yet, topping the $103,000 he earned for a seventh-place showing in a $10,000 Triton One Jeju event this spring.
Today, we continue that tradition with fresh daily updates, breaking news, tournament coverage, player stories, and expert insights that keep you connected to the fast-moving poker world. But high-stakes poker players typically have large amounts of cash and casino chips. Just eight players remain, with bracelet winner Eric Rodawig and former German Soccer pro and poker enthusiast Max Kruse rounding out the top three. A few days later, Super High Roller Bowl XI rolls out on Oct. 8 with a $103,000 buy-in for no-limit hold’em players. Have you talked to American players about coming to play APT events? While the other students in her graduate program spent the summer teaching or taking classes, Welman headed to Las Vegas under the extremely convenient premise that the trip would further her research into poker players.
Since I mostly play high-stakes events in the US, which normally start and finish late, I might be more suited to the pace of US high-stakes tournaments because I’m a night owl. How are APT events different from tournaments that you play in the United States? Tony ‘Ren’ Lin has become one of the most recognizable and successful players in the world, crushing the high-stakes tournament scene to the tune of over $20M in Hendon Mob-recorded earnings. Towards the tail end of my career, as Black Friday’s immediate effects had worn off and people realized the new status quo was never going to be the boom again, players became very wary of the media. Poker players during that era had television identities, online personas, forum reputations, and private selves that could be very different from one another.
In December 2023, the Bahamas hosted a WSOP bracelet series for the first time. With essentially every poker game and format to choose from, and buy-ins from $300 up to $250,000, this year’s schedule has something for every player and fan. Those survivors will lock up at least $1 million before returning to Las Vegas on August 3 to play for poker’s most coveted title, the gold bracelet and the $10 million first-place prize. Zhao Liu, who started third in chips, was the final player to fall. Gaston was the only player to finish Saturday with more than 20 million chips, yet his big stack translated into a 36th-place finish. Deeb, meanwhile, continues to treat poker’s biggest tournament like it’s just another day at the office.
There are some tables that play tighter on the feature. Like most other tournaments, Deeb feels like his people-reading skills will be crucial in determining how to handle each lineup he faces. Despite losing a big pot on the second-to-last hand of the night, he has a healthy 4,300,000 going into day 6. Shaun Deeb spent much of the later stages of day 5 as one of the chip leaders. He navigated through another massive field in 2024, winning that year’s Mystery Millions event for a $1 million first-place prize.
Registration for all summer events will open soon, streamlining the path to the podium. Play will proceed until the final table is reached on July 13, with specifics on the Main Event final table play dates and broadcast coverage pokernewsdaily.com to be announced at a later date. In 2024, the flagship event in Las Vegas attracted 229,553 entrants and awarded more than $438 million in prize money – both all-time records for the series. For the historic achievement of winning his fourth Poker Players Championship as well as the Main Event in the same summer, the now nine-time WSOP bracelet winner was informed by his peers that, via a unanimous vote, he would become the 65th member of the Poker Hall of Fame. Cate Schiller is a Global Content Coordinator for The Sporting News affiliate and commercial content team, focused on partnerships supporting live events, entertainment and travel.
And so I’d say in the last 15, 20 years, yes, this is the most hold’em I’ve played in a long time. “When I first got into poker, I was grinding the low-limit stuff after retiring from hockey,” said Mueller. The nine-time WSOP bracelet winner could lock down his third WSOP Player of the Year title, an emphatic 10th bracelet win, and the biggest result of his accomplished career, all in one swoop. The 2014 WSOP bracelet winner once again held court for long stretches of the ESPN+ broadcast and positioned himself for an incredible opportunity on day 8.
Media Summary: WSOP Day 38 of 51
Inspired by similar “invite-only” events that ran at the time, Binion began laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the World Series of Poker (WSOP). Winning his lone piece of WSOP hardware by taking down the Monster Stack event at the 2024 WSOP International Circuit series in Marrakech ($45,600), Bojovic is in contention to win the most prestigious poker trophy of them all. Luka Bojovic (Vienna, Austria) – 51,000,000 ChipsLuka Bojovic, 37, is a Serbian doctor and poker player residing in Vienna, Austria. Kenny Hallaert (London, England, United Kingdom) – 80,500,000 ChipsKenny Hallaert, 43, is a Belgian professional poker player residing in London, England. On the cusp of adding a WSOP Main Event title to his already long list of poker accolades, taking down the 2025 WSOP Main Event would add $10 million to Mizrachi’s already impressive live tournament earnings total of just over $19 million. A seven-time WSOP bracelet winner, Mizrachi has already had a historic summer, winning his record fourth Poker Players Championship title.
As another exciting stretch of the series comes to a close, take a look back at the newly crowned champions from the past few days at poker’s most prestigious tournament festival. The final three players then enjoyed a short break before returning to the table. The $25,000 buy-in event saw China’s Yinan Zhou navigate a final table that included Liv Boeree and Justin Bonomo to win his first bracelet and $6 million. Other events included a $1,500 Mystery Bounty, a $25,000 GGMillion$ High Roller, and two pot-limit Omaha tournaments. In partnership with GGPoker, the WSOP announced the opportunity for players to win one of 15 WSOP bracelets in the Caribbean in December of 2023. The series made its debut in 2023 from December 3-14 and featured 15 bracelet events across different variants with over $51 million in guarantees.
The last poker player to pull off back-to-back victories in the WSOP Main Event, Chan achieved poker immortality by continuing to build on his historic WSOP success, becoming the first player to win 10 WSOP bracelets in 2005. While all-time poker great Johnny Chan won his first WSOP bracelet in a Limit Hold’em event during the 1985 WSOP, his greatest poker accomplishment would begin two years later. A member of the PokerCoaching.com pro team, much of Hendrix’s over $8 million in live tournament winnings come from wins in tournaments on the PokerGO Tour as well as plenty of deep runs in WSOP events. No stranger to success on the felt, Hallaert has racked up a number of poker tournament titles across poker tournament series around Europe, contributing to $5.9 million in live tournament winnings across his career. A historic WSOP Main Event final table that includes not only a four-time Poker Players Championship winner but also the first woman since 1995, poker fans around the world look forward to a highly anticipated conclusion to the 2025 WSOP Main Event.
In this Series
Most people know the summer series in Las Vegas, where the $10,000 Main Event turns ordinary players into legends. It’s a new development for poker players to deal with this. Everyone remaining has already secured a payout of at least $36,395 from the $1,441,500 prize pool, but players are sure to be gunning for the $357,026 and coveted gold bracelet awaiting the champion.
In February 2025, the official 2025 WSOP schedule was released, featuring 100 bracelet events for the very first time. The best Seven Card Stud players in the world are set to battle in one of the most prestigious seven-card tournaments. But there are many other players who could bolster their PHOF credentials with strong performances this summer, potentially taking the induction away from Schulman or Seiver. PokerNews is back again providing unrivaled live reporting coverage of the greatest spectacle in poker for each bracelet event. Coming into the final day of play with a substantial chip lead, Adriaan Jacobs was able to leverage his momentum to win his first WSOP bracelet.
The prize money for the top two places was frozen, and after an internal investigation, Carroll and Yaginuma received even prizes, but the bracelet itself was withheld. He’s tied with Glaser, who tacked on three wins to get to eight in 2025, and Mizrachi, who was also a multi-time 2025 WSOP champion. Deeb, who won his eighth bracelet at WSOP Europe in 2025, added two to his total last year. His sixth, seventh, and eighth career WSOP wins, all in different mixed game formats, seemingly gave Glaser the inside track to becoming WSOP Player of the Year and the star of the festival. Starting flight offers a final opportunity to bag chips and chase big bounties.
As usual, the PokerNews live reporting team will be on the floor to provide all the action until a champion has been crowned, and the same also applies to all other remaining 2025 WSOP gold bracelets as well. With the start of Level 8 on Day 2d this upcoming Monday, July 6, 2025, the late registration will officially close, and the annual flagship tournament is set to conclude on July 16 in Las Vegas. The respective survivors of each of the four opening flights will return to their seats at noon local time and play another five levels of two hours each. The 2025 WSOP Main Event bracelet was also revealed to the public today and presented by American magician and illusionist Criss Angel on the stage of the Horseshoe Event Center. While many poker pros joined the action today, thousands of enthusiasts from all over the world also joined the fray along with numerous celebrities.
ESPN coverage of the 2026 WSOP main event is set to start with day 1a of the tournament, on Thursday, July 2, and run through the entirety of the tournament. The first official day of WSOP tournament action also includes a $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em event, which kicks off at 2 p.m. Until ESPN enters the picture later in the summer, final tables and live streams will air in-house on WSOP’s digital platforms, primarily on YouTube, starting on May 29. Once the final nine players are set, chip bags come out, and players are sent on their way for an extended break. While most WSOP events last three days and several take a full week to complete, this turbo tournament was finished in a single session. He is just the ninth player to ever surpass the $60-million mark, and is now ranked ninth on poker’s all-time money list.
The following year, the tournament saw its first buy-in of $5,000 and this was increased to $10,000 in 1972. The first World Series took place in 1970 and featured no tournaments at all. Each year, a dedicated team of live reporters, editors, presenters, videographers and photographers help make PokerNews the place to be when it comes to staying up-to-date on the World Series. PokerNews has attended every World Series of Poker since 2007, and is proud to serve as the official live coverage partner of the WSOP, including Main Event coverage.
- For 2026, the first gold bracelet event to kick off is a $500 mini Mystery Millions, featuring six starting flights across five days.
- New for 2026, WSOP will award $1M in total to POY competitors, with the player who finishes first receiving a $100,000 WSOP Paradise 2026 package.
- In December 2023, the Bahamas hosted a WSOP bracelet series for the first time.
- The average stack of 26,317,142 represents just shy of 44 big blinds when play resumes.
- Throughout this tournament, I played like very, very good poker.
The 57th-annual running of this storied event attracted 9,208 entries by the time registration officially closed, making it the fourth-largest yet. Further adding to a historic summer, Japanese poker pro Shiina Okamoto made history by becoming the first woman to win the WSOP Ladies Event in back-to-back years. Winning the two toughest poker tournaments in a single year, an accomplishment many thought was impossible, the governing board of the Poker Hall of Fame held an emergency vote, and unanimously voted Mizrachi into the Hall of Fame. Moving to the Horseshoe and Paris in 2022, for the first time in the event’s history, the WSOP would be held on the Las Vegas Strip. Since Spinella’s lone WSOP bracelet victory in 2015, he has gone on to win five WSOP Circuit rings and accrue over $1.7 million in WSOP tournament winnings. From the momentum spurred by Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP Main Event in 2003 and the ensuing Poker Boom, the WSOP saw record attendance year after year, culminating in the largest tournaments in the event’s history.
Thus, it’s unlikely Las Vegas casinos will relax this type of scrutiny any time soon. In 2018, Dennis Blieden won the World Poker Tour Los Angeles Poker Classic main event for $1 million. 2024 WSOP main event champion Jonathan Tamayo told Card Player he needed to show a copy of his tax returns when he deposited cash. Sadly, was locked out of playing yesterday because of it.
The 2024 World Series of Poker (WSOP) is scheduled to take place from Tuesday, May 28 through Wednesday, July 17 at the Horseshoe and Paris Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. With MyPlayers, you can track your favorite pros, friends, or family members across every reported event. Other sites may post summaries, but only PokerNews has the full hand histories, photos, and chip counts reported live from the floor. PokerNews is the official source for official WSOP live reporting coverage. Expect on-the-fly video content, and daily recaps to keep you up to speed even if you miss the live action.