WPT’s Season-Ending Championship Returns To Wynn For Fourth Straight Year

Wynn Las Vegas will again host the World Poker Tour World Championship this December, the WPT announced.

A WPT press release outlines key dates for this year’s Wynn series. Following the precedent set in prior years, the schedule will open with the $1,100 WPT Prime Championship, running from Dec. 7 to 12. The $10,400 World Championship follows from Dec. 13-19. Both events will feature televised final tables, and these will be on back-to-back days: Dec. 20 for the WPT Prime and Dec. 21 for the World Championship.

This marks the fourth consecutive year of the WPT World Championship at Wynn.

WPT CEO Adam Pliska extolled the virtues of the continued collaboration between the tour and the venue:

The WPT World Championship is a true celebration of poker, and Wynn Las Vegas has proven to be the ultimate stage. This event has become one of the most anticipated events on the global poker calendar and we look forward to welcoming players from all over the world to compete for life changing sums of money and their chance to make history.

No guarantee for the $10K World Championship?

Notably, the presser announcing the WPT World Championship included no mention of a guaranteed prize pool. Last year’s World Championship also ran without a guarantee and drew a smaller field than the preceding years.

The 2024 WPT World Championship had 2,392 entries. Although that’s a healthy number by the standards of most live poker tournaments, it pales in comparison to the turnouts of the prior two years.

In 2023, the WPT made headlines by setting a highly ambitious $40 million guarantee, a big jump from the $25 million target of 2022. Although the lofty target resulted in record attendance for the event, it fell slightly short of the required number to meet the guarantee. Factoring in the tournament fee, WPT would have needed 4,082 entries to create that $40 million prize pool. Instead, registration closed with only 3,835 players in the field.

That shortfall of 247 entries meant that WPT had to add roughly $2.5 million in overlay to meet its guarantee. That exceeded the tournament fees it had collected by about $120,000, meaning that it took a gross loss on the tournament even before accounting for the cost of running it.

WPT responded to that financial mishap by eliminating the guarantee entirely for 2024, and attendance declined 42%. Here’s a big-picture look at the past three editions of the WPT World Championship:

*Reflects three-way deal

Once again, the WPT World Championship will have three starting flights. Last year, it allowed players one entry per flight, but without re-entry within a single flight. The announcement for the 2025 tournament did not include information about whether that would be the case again this year.

Last year’s Championship ended in a three-way deal between Scott Stewart, Rob Sherwood, and Edward Pak. That allowed each player to lock up at least $2 million, after which they played for the title, with Stewart emerging as the official champion.

WPT Prime Returns As Precursor To World Championship

The only other major piece of news in the presser was the return of the WPT Prime Championship, the season-ending event for the WPT’s lower buy-in series.

WPT Prime has served as a lead-in to the World Championship each year at the Wynn, and that will once again be the case. The winner netted more than $1 million each of the past two years. Here’s a look at the performance of the event thus far:

Will WPT Include Special Promos, ClubWPT Gold Tie-Ins?

While the WPT eschewed a guarantee for the main event last year, it would be tough to accuse them of skimping on promotions. Perhaps the most buzzed-about tournament of the series was the ClubWPT Gold $5M Invitational Freeroll.

Over the months leading up to the event, WPT qualified more than 1,000 players through a variety of avenues, including direct satellites and online giveaways, for one of the biggest freerolls in poker history.

The whole thing served to promote ClubWPT Gold, the company’s poker sweepstakes site.

With ClubWPT Gold now up and running — and making more headlines this summer at the World Series of Poker — it remains to be seen whether WPT will run any special promos or qualify players for the marquee December events at Wynn.

Last year’s schedule also included a variety of mixed games, as well as a $25,800 High Roller. The WPT’s presser concluded with the promise that a full schedule, including satellites and side events, will be released “in the coming weeks.”

Image credit: WPT via Flickr (license)