WPT Wraps Historic Season and Announces 2023 Events

Written by Jennifer Newell

Last updated on January 2nd, 2023

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Much has been said about the World Poker Tour in recent weeks. The company just celebrated its 20^th anniversary throughout 2022 and ended it with a record-breaking WPT World Championship at Wynn in Las Vegas. Three weeks of tournaments at Wynn included a range of mixed games and high rollers, along with a Ladies Championship, WPT Prime Championship, and WPT World Championship Main Event. The series finished with a woman, Cherish Andrews, as the Player of the Festival and set numerous field records. For example, the $200K guarantee on the Ladies Championship was the highest guarantee ever on a women-only event, though the actual prize pool broke through that number with $560,660 in the pot. And the Main Event of all main events set an ambitious $15M guarantee but nearly doubled that when that prize pool exceeded $29M. The reviews of the Wynn series were extremely positive, already setting higher expectations and prompting excitement for the next one in 2023. Lost in the hubbub, somewhat, was the completion of Season XX of the World Poker Tour and the end of the first WPT Prime season.

Final WPT Season XX Numbers

For the first time in WPT history, the World Poker Tour season ran in conjunction with the calendar year. Overall, for the main tour, Season XX hosted ten events. In total for the Main Event of each stop only, they delivered 13,544 entries and paid 1,700 players. And those ten Main Event tournaments created prize pools that totaled $70,797,900. It culminated in the largest WPT World Championship in WPT history. It was a massive undertaking that turned into a massive success. And the $10K buy-in Main Event that was the culmination of all of the efforts with Wynn Las Vegas tallied a prize pool of more than $29M from 2,960 entries. In the end, Eliot Hudon of Canada beat Benny Glaser of England to take the title and more than $4.1M in prize money. Let’s take a look at the entirety of the WPT Season XX Main Event results:

WPT Prime Debut

Amidst the World Poker Tour’s anniversary announcements was one of rebranding. They ended the WPTDeepStacks tour and replaced it with the new WPT Prime. The buy-in levels stayed at or near $1K for Main Events, but the series tended to go to more destinations around the world and offer generally more affordable tournaments and series. The inaugural WPT Prime season didn’t actually begin until May with stops in Vietnam, Australia, and Cambodia. They then went to Madrid and Taiwan before wrapping it up with a Prime Championship at the WPT Wynn series at the end of 2022. That Prime finale did better than predicted as well. Its $1K price point had a $2M guarantee, but the entries totaling 5,430 took the prize pool over $5.2M, more than 2.5 times the promised amount. Here are the Main Event results for those six WPT Prime stops of 2022:   https://twitter.com/WPT/status/1606707360503922689?s=20&t=yQd3uxsZmTefmc2FZ757fQ

Starting Strong in 2023

As the WPT World Championship was making history in Las Vegas, the tour decided to release the first half of its 2023 schedule for Season XXI. The season will start with a number of WPT Prime stops, starting in Paris in late January and then heading to Australia, Cambodia, Amsterdam, and India. The main tour doesn’t host its first event April. The WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown will kick the season into high gear and goes from California to Florida and Oklahoma before returning to California. The schedule thus far is only through June, and there is room in the lineup for more stops to be added if agreements are signed in short order. For now, the schedule – for the Main Events only, not entire festivals – is as follows:

-January 31-February 5:  WPT Prime Paris at Club Circus Paris in France

https://twitter.com/WPT/status/1608185762519949312?s=20&t=yQd3uxsZmTefmc2FZ757fQ

-March 2-6:  WPT Prime Gold Coast at Star Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia -March 16-20:  WPT Prime Cambodia at Naga World Integrated Resort in Phnom Penh, Cambodia -March 29-April 1:  WPT Prime Amsterdam at Holland Casino in Netherlands -April 1-4:  WPT Rolling Thunder (main tour) at Thunder Valley Casino in Lincoln, California -April 13-17:  WPT Prime India at Deltin Royale Casino in Goa, India -April 28-May 2:  WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown (main tour) in Florida -May 5-8:  WPT Choctaw (main tour) in Durant, Oklahoma -May 11-15:  WPT Prime Slovakia at Card Casino Bratislava in Slovakia -May 21-25:  WPT Gardens Poker Championship (main tour) in Hawaiian Gardens, California -May 25-29:  WPT Prime Vietnam at Crown Poker Club in Hanoi, Vietnam -June 7-11:  WPT Prime Sanremo at Casino di Sanremo in Italy

The new stops in the mix are Slovakia, the new location in Vietnam, and Sanremo on the Italian Riviera. WPT CEO Adam Pliska called Season XXI one to anticipate, as there are new partnerships interspersed with relationships with “longstanding staples” of the WPT. https://twitter.com/WPT/status/1603505518093352960?s=20&t=yQd3uxsZmTefmc2FZ757fQ    

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