The World Series of Poker Main Event is always the biggest and most exciting tournament of the year. With ESPN returning in 2026, it feels that little bit more special.
Day 1A is traditionally the quietest starting flight. Last year, it drew 923 runners with 634 players bagging up at the end of the night. Victor Vo bagged the biggest stack of 350K and he went on to cash for $17,500.
We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but the 2025 Day 1B chip leader was Michael Mizrachi (297K), who went on to win the Main Event for a cool $10 million. He did the shuffle-up-and-deal this year. He couldn't win it again, could he?
Numbers are down in 2026. By the end of Day 1A, the field had ticked up to 772 players with 543 progressing. Japan's Ryuta Nakai ended as chip leader on Day 1A with 323K. His fantasy managers will be hoping that he can spin this stack into a big points haul.
You don't have to look too far down the leaderboard to find a name that stands out. Scott Seiver has 177,300 chips and will be hoping that his unlikely double in the very first orbit of the event is a portent of things to come.
If – and obviously this is a very big if – the rest of the Main Event follows the same trend over 2025, we'll end up with 8,080 runners. We'll take the overs on that.
If you think we're going to get over 10K runners this year, you can buy the Kalshi market – "Will the 2026 WSOP Main Event have over 10,000 entries?" – at 27%. We'll take the 'no'.
Poor timing for Hellmuth
It might not have universal support but Phil Hellmuth's fancy-dress entrance is a WSOP tradition that goes back almost 20 years.
Unfortunately for Hellmuth, he chose to make a scene on Day 1A this year, just as Daniel Negreanu won his eighth bracelet in the $100K PLO.
Negreanu's rail wasn't moving. Someone on his rail asked Negreanu to film it for the vlog. "I'm busy winning," Negreanu said as he finished Artur Martirosian off. Hellmuth marched onto the feature table to congratulate Negreanu in full superhero costume (watch in the video below).
If Hellmuth was butthurt at not being center stage, he didn't show it. In fact, he was in great spirits at the feature table, where he had everyone laughing with the following quip.
"One thing about my sons," he said, "they're both really nice people. They're great people and polite to everybody. Obviously they didn't get it from f***ing me."
By the end of the evening, he had added 6K to his starting stack of 60K – almost 20K less than last year when he bagged 85,000 on Day 1B.
In an interview with the WSOP's Jeff Platt at the end of the day, Hellmuth said, "I didn't pick up many hands which was quite frustrating. I made a couple of moves. I'm really stressed out about my son. I see the effort Nick's putting into this thing and it's stressful."
Nick came over from the other feature table to talk to Platt, who asked how he was feeling.
"I feel like I'm as on top of my game as I'm ever going to be for how long I've been playing," Nick said. "Today was not my day. I'm hoping all the bad luck from today is a sign I'll get good luck when the blinds are higher."
Hellmuth asked Nick how many chips he bagged – the answer was 45,700.
"That makes me happy," Hellmuth said. "I've been trying to teach my sons – it's super important. Even if you make the end of Day 1 with 30,000, you still have a ton of chips. Everyone's panicking at 40K or 30K, but not the top pros – we know."
That's some good parental advice.
The stream – free for some
ESPN is in the house. It's got the big cameras out and is streaming every day, with action from the Day 1s starting at 5pm PT. It's back to a one-hour delay which means better start and end times for everyone in the US.
Some people seemed surprised and annoyed it was behind the ESPN+ paywall.
But this was always the plan, as revealed by Norman Chad in a PokerOrg interview back in April. And Chad predicted that some people wouldn't be happy.
"I think some people will be a little confused or unhappy when we get to the Main Event. The Main Event will be livestreamed, but it's not on ESPN or ESPN 2. It'll be on the ESPN app."
There was great news for folks living outside the US, including Canada, the UK and Australia, where the stream was free on the WSOP YouTube channel.
You can't win the Main Event on Day 1
But you can lose it.
And if you are going to lose it, you might as well do it in style. Anthony Marini got all of his chips in the middle preflop with 
in the first 15 minutes of play.
Once Ryan Sands six-bet all in, Marini could only realistically be up against aces, but he called anyway. A king-high flop meant Sands had to endure a sweat, but he survived and doubled his starting stack to 120,000. By the end of the night, he'd chipped up to 144.5K.
Leo Margets had a run for the ages last year when she made the final table and ended in seventh for a career-best cash of $1,500,000.
It didn't go so well for her today. She endured the nightmare of running kings into aces, and lost most of her stack to Hannes Jeschka. That left her with 8,000 chips. She rallied, finding a double, but was eliminated later in the evening.
Who will be the player to make the epic run this year? We'll find out over the next 10 days.
Notable end-of-night stacks
- Ryuta Nakai (Japan): 323,000
- Masato Yokosawa (Japan): 221,800
- Tyler Phillips (USA): 204,500
- Scott Seiver (USA): 177,300
- Joe Cada (USA): 133,600
- Sam Soverel (USA): 112,600
- Jeremy Ausmus (USA): 109,300
- Tony Dunst (USA): 105,000
- Andrew Lichtenberger (USA): 94,700
- Aleksejs Ponakovs (Latvia): 93,000
- Erik Seidel (USA): 86,400
- Stephen Chidwick (USA): 83,400
- Greg Merson (USA): 81,200
- Dan Weinman (USA): 79,300
- Rob Kuhn (USA): 69,900
- Phil Hellmuth (USA): 66,000
- Jonathan Little (USA): 61,600
- Brandon Wilson (USA): 64,500
- Olivier Busquet (USA): 46,300
- Nick Hellmuth (USA): 45,700
- Toby Lewis (UK): 39,400
- Maria Konnikova (USA): 39,000
- Billy Baxter (USA): 19,800
- Jason Koon (USA): 18,700
Notable players eliminated
- Jared Bleznick
- Seth Davies
- Chad Eveslage
- Leo Margets
- Adrian Mateos
- Dan Smith
Day 1B of the 2026 WSOP Main Event starts at 11am on Friday.
Images courtesy of WSOP.
