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WPT World Championship at Wynn Set for Nov-Dec

Written by Jennifer Newell
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The World Poker Tour has had a record-setting season thus far.

It started 2023 riding high on the massive success that was the WTP World Championship at Wynn in December 2022, the first foray into the WPT-Wynn partnership. The reviews were glowing, and the WPT Main Event that guaranteed $15M for its prize pool nearly doubled that amount when registration closed. That series closed out the historic 20th season for the tour.

Kicking off 2023, the mid-majors WPT Prime tour hosted its new stop at Club Circus Paris with a prize pool that exceeded €1M. At the Star Gold Coast in Australia, the prize pool for its WPT Prime Main Event surpassed AUD$2M. Both set new consecutive non-championship Prime records. When the Main Tour started in March, it was in Northern California, where the WPT Rolling Thunder Main Event became the largest to date.

Season XXI has been full of firsts, with new stops and new records, all as the WPT executives were meeting behind the scenes to finalize the schedule for the WPT World Championship. And the announcement was worth the wait.

The $40M Announcement

Poker players and fans expected a solid WPT World Championship schedule for Wynn Las Vegas in December 2023. There was little doubt that the series would try to outdo its own success from December 2022. No one expected the guarantee, though.

The WPT World Championship Main Event at Wynn in December will guarantee a $40M prize pool.

The full schedule featured more than 30 tournaments, including a Big One for One Drop with a $1M buy-in and WPT Alpha8 with a $50K buy-in.

WPT CEO Adam Pliska said the series in 2023 “is poised to reach new heights, and we wanted to match that expectation with a guarantee that no live poker tournament has ever seen before.”

Wynn Poker Operations Executive Director Ryan Beauregard added, “The astonishing support and excitement we’ve seen from the poker community after just one year is nothing like I’ve seen before. We look forward to the 2023 WPT World Championship and hosting another industry-leading event with an unparalleled player experience.”

Full WPT-Wynn Schedule

The action will begin on November 29 with one of the featured events, an eight-flight $600 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event posting a $1M guarantee. The three-flight $1,600 buy-in Mystery Bounty starts on December 4 with a $2M guarantee, and the three-flight WPT Prime Championship will offer its $1,100 buy-in with a $5M guarantee, the latter a significant increase from the $2M guarantee last year.

This year’s schedule features everything from a HORSE Championship to 8-Game Mix, a Seniors and Seniors High Roller, an Alpha8 and Big One for One Drop, and a Ladies Championship.

The full schedule is posted online.

Ivey in for Big One for One Drop

Someone had to be the first player to buy in to the Big One for One Drop tournament. It is no coincidence that it is WPT Ambassador and one of the best players in the world Phil Ivey.

If the Big One for One Drop sounds familiar, that’s because it is not a new tournament, only new to the World Poker Tour. The One Drop Foundation, which operates its nonprofit with the goal of supplying clean water to every person in the world through various initiatives, was the charity launched by Canadian entrepreneur and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte. When he played high-stakes poker regularly, he worked with the World Series of Poker as a charitable partner.

They first held the Big One for One Drop with a $1M buy-in in 2012 at the summer WSOP. Its 48 players created a prize pool of $42.6M, and Antonio Esfandiari won it for $18.3M.

The 2014 Big One for One Drop brought in 42 entries, from which Daniel Colman prevailed and won more than $15M. The next million-dollar buy-in event was the Monte Carlo One Drop Extravaganza, which attracted 28 players and crowned Elton Tsang the champion, and the next WSOP version was in 2018, and of the 27 entries, Justin Bonomo won the tournament for $10M.

The One Drop association with the WSOP then disappeared.

That was until the World Poker Tour partnered with the One Drop Foundation in 2023.

The announcement earlier in the year indicated that the charitable initiative would begin in the summer at Wynn Las Vegas. It did, with the WPT EveryOne for One Drop tournament – a $10K buy-in with a $10M guarantee. And the next was in the same series, a WPT Alph8 for One Drop with an $111K buy-in. The first of those two events attracted 1,676 entries, a $16.2M prize pool (including $335,200 for One Drop), and Bin Weng as the champion with $2.2M. The Alpha8 version brought in 45 entries, created a $4.6M prize pool (with $315K for One Drop and the Wynn Resorts Foundation), and awarded the $1.5M first-place prize to Jonathan Jaffe.

The next step in the partnership is to put another Big One for One Drop on the books. It will play December 18-120 amidst the Wynn World Championship. And not long after the announcement of the full December schedule, Ivey took a suitcase of cash to Wynn to buy in. “The Big One is what high stakes is all about,” Ivey said.

Jennifer Newell

Jennifer Newell

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Jennifer Newell is a freelance writer at LegalUsPokerSites. She has two decades of experience in the iGaming industry. She is a respected poker media member, contributing to publications and websites like USA Today, PokerStars, and PokerScout. Her knowledge spans gambling legislation and the broader online gaming world. She has spent years advocating for diversity, most notably gender equity in the traditionally male-dominated poker sphere.

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