Maryland's MGM National Harbor Hotel and Casino has released preliminary information for February's 2025 Potomac Winter Poker Open, one of the venue's largest poker series. The 2025 edition of the Potomac Winter Poker Open will offer 18 numbered events over 13 days of tournament action, running February 5-17, 2025.
The festival guarantees $2.45 million in prize payouts. That combined total, though, comes from only the six events that carry individual guarantees. With 12 other varied and popular offerings available, the series should easily top $3 million in overall payouts.
Two of the six events with guaranteed prize pools will lock in at least $1 million each in payouts. Those are the festival's opening event, the NHL Opener, which offers seven starting flights over the series' first four days before its Day 2 conclusion on February 9.
The other guaranteed $1 million prize pool will be offered in the PWPO's Main Event. That tourney will offer two starting flights, on February 14 and 15, with the Day 3 finale occuring on February 17. Satellites into both of these events are also available. The other guaranteed pools will be offered in four other no-limit hold'em events, including a $200,000 guarantee in the festival's high-roller offering.
Wide variety of tourney formats
Though the guarantees come only in the open NLH events with relatively standard formats, the festival actually offers a wide choices in games. MGM National Harbor's monthly 'Cakes Bounty Classic', featuring area sports-radio personality John 'Cakes' Auville, is incorporated into the series for February. A separate 'Black Chip' bounty event is also on the slate.
The PWPO offers several other interesting events as well. Among the various NLH offerings are seniors (50+), womens, and 'Rookie' events, with the rookie tourney open only to players with less than $50,000 in career Hendon Mob cashes.
Other poker variants appear as well. Omaha-only events occur three times among the 18 events, with Omaha-8, PLO-8, and Big O tourneys the variants being added to the mix. Omaha also appears as part of a 'R.O.S.E.' mixed-games tourney -- like H.O.R.S.E. but without the fixed-limit hold'em -- midway through the series.
The full arrangement of buy-ins has yet to be finalized and announced, but MGM National Harbor issued a note in conjunction with its PWPO announcement that it no longer withholds any auto-gratuities for staff from event buy-ins. The casino has declared that, in lieu of withholding mandatory gratuities, each event will offer an optional add-on, offered along with the initial entry fee.
When all buy-ins are finalized and tourney structures locked into place, the complete 2025 Potomac Winter Poker Open schedule will be published on a dedicated landing page for the festival. Whether online qualifiers to the PWPO Main Event will be made available for BetMGM customers in neighboring Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as occurred in 2024, has also not been announced.
