The World Poker Tour has announced that this season's main tour championship will have a record-breaking $15 million guarantee. This makes it the largest guarantee ever for a live tourney.
The WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas will be a $10,400 buy-in event. The WPT World Championship which will be the main event in a twenty-day-long series starting on the first of December 2022.
The final table will move to the Esports Arena Las Vegas where it will be filmed for TV.
“This is one of the most ambitious initiatives the World Poker Tour has undertaken in our 20-year history,” Adam Pliska, CEO of World Poker Tour, said of the event in a recent presser. “We expect this to be a highly anticipated festival and are elated to be partnering with Wynn Las Vegas to bring this concept to life.”
Brad Owen, one of the WPT's newest ambassadors posted a promotional video plugging the event. His colleague Andrew Neeme also added a plug for the margaritas at Casa Playa next door the Wynn.
Record-setting Wynn
The Wynn is the perfect partner for something of this scale. In 2021, the Wynn set the record that the WPT World Championship has now broken. The inaugural Wynn Millions event had the ambitious guarantee of $10 million. The poker world smashed that guarantee when the event ended up garnering 1,328 entries.
Andrew Moreno won $1.46 million for taking that event down and expectations were set sky-high for the 2022 edition.
However, the 2022 edition cut the guarantee a little fine with 1,075 players entering for a $10,105,000 prize pool. Still, the result was a star-studded final table with Vanessa Kade, Sean Perry, and Isaac Kempton. That was back in March of this year and the poker/pandemic landscape has changed a bit.
Now, the Wynn are trying again, this time with WPT branding. Branding which appears to be worth an extra two to five hundred players if that guarantee is to be believed.
“We offer our guests the biggest and best poker experiences available, coupled with the world-class service and amenities that can only be found at Wynn Las Vegas,” Ryan Beauregard, the Executive Director of Poker Operations at Wynn Las Vegas, explained. “In partnership with WPT, we have created a festival that will be a one-of-a-kind, must-attend event for both our current and new players.”
World Poker Tour festival
The twenty-day series which will accompany the $15 million guaranteed World Championship will have a full schedule of side events and is likely to be a recurring event on the poker calendar.
Angelica Hael is the Vice President of Global Tour Management at World Poker Tour. She said, “We are absolutely thrilled with our multi-year partnership with Wynn Las Vegas."
Adding that, "Alongside the WPT Prime Championship and various off-the-felt activities planned, the WPT World Championship festival puts a historic exclamation point on World Poker Tour Season 20.”
The festival will also double-up as the final leg of the WPT Prime series with a $1,100 WPT Prime Championship held from December 8 to December 12. The WPT Prime is the medium buy-in series that replaced the WPT DeepStacks series this year.
The WPT Prime final table will also be televised.
Featured image source: WPT
