No one could accuse the WSOP Paradise poker festival of lacking ambition, and it is nailing its colors to the mast once more with today’s announcement of a record-breaking $60 million guarantee for December’s Super Main Event. The series will take place from December 4-18 at the Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas.
WSOP Paradise is the winter equivalent of the annual summer World Series of Poker festival, taking place right now at the Horseshoe and Paris casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. The ‘Paradise’ in the name relates to the fact it takes place in the warm Caribbean climes of The Bahamas — the perfect place to catch some winter sun in the run-up to Christmas.
As with the summer series, WSOP Paradise events award official winner’s bracelets across a range of different games, formats and variants. Where the traditional WSOP features a Main Event with a $10K buy-in, the centerpiece of the Paradise equivant is a ‘Super Main Event’ with a buy-in of $25K.
It’s this main attraction for which hosts WSOP, in partnership with GGPoker and Triton Poker, are guaranteeing the largest ever prizepool for a single poker tournament, with at least $60 million to be divided among the winners.
Raising the stakes
2025 marks the third year of WSOP Paradise, and the most ambitious target yet. The inaugural festival in 2023 centered around a $5K Main Event with a $15M guarantee, requiring 3,000 entrants to avoid an overlay. This figure was covered, just, with 3,010 entrants creating a prizepool of $15.05M. Germany's Stanislav Zegal took it down for $2M.
Last year’s WSOP Paradise ramped up the numbers by a considerable margin, turning the Main Event into a Super Main Event with the cost of entry rising from $5K to $25K, and a guaranteed prizepool setting a new record high of $50M.
2,000 entrants was the magic number to hit, and they amost did, but not quite. In the end 1,978 entries fell just short of the required number, but the full $50M in prize money was awarded, as promised, with China's Yinan Zhou winning $6M and the bracelet.
December’s upcoming WSOP Paradise Super Main Event now has a $60M guarantee, a new record, with the number of entrants required to avoid an overlay now set at 2,400. Can this year’s Super Main Event attract over 400 more entries than last year?
The possibility of an overlay, coupled with the presence of many online qualifiers, drew a significant number of poker’s high rollers to The Bahamas last winter, from Phil Hellmuth to Daniel Negreanu and many more names familiar to those who follow the action from the Triton Super High Roller Series.
It even brought some players out of ‘retirement’, including former PokerStars ambassador Liv Boeree, who made the final table and won $2.8M for her 4th place finish — the biggest ever cash by a female poker player.
'Freaking insane!'
In addition to the Super Main Event, WSOP Paradise will feature a number of events in partnership with Triton Poker, including Triton Main events for both no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha — both with buy-ins of $100K — and the return of the Triton Invitational.
As in last year’s series, the Triton Invitational will be a $250K buy-in event with the field split evenly between invited figures from the world of business and entertainment, and the poker professionals which each invitee can partner up.
A separate $25K buy-in hold’em event, the GGMillion$, will also run with a guaranteed prize pool of $10M.
“I said last year that a $50M guarantee for the Super Main Event was crazy,” commented GGPoker ambassador Daniel Negreanu, “adding another $10,000,000 on top is freaking insane!”
“They called us crazy last year for launching the Super Main Event with the biggest live tournament guarantee ever,” added WSOP CEO Ty Stewart. “Consider this a re-raise.”
Additional images courtesy of WSOP Paradise.
