The WSOP main event

02 Jul, 2026

The World Series of Poker Main Event begins today.

1. The Main Event is unquestionably the focal point of the entire World Series of Poker, which now consists of 100 separate tournaments over 7 weeks. It costs $10,000 to enter—same as it did in 1970¹—and somewhere around 10,000 people will give it a spin. Meaning the prize pool will be in the $93 million range after the 7% rake. First place was $10 million last year.

2. It’s no longer the most expensive buy-in—there are now 13 “high roller” events with buy-ins ranging from $25,000 to $250,000, and numerous other $10,000 events—but it is the most prestigious. Which is the kind of human social dynamic that’s both hard to explain but easy to understand.

3. The Main Event is also the only tournament in the world with a 5-figure buy-in that has so many amateurs participating. It’s a bucket-list item for many casual poker players—many of whom have no business playing for anything close to these stakes—and its cultural cache also attracts a fair amount of celebrities and wealthy people playing on a lark. This creates a ratio of amateurs-to-pros that is otherwise unheard of at this price point.

4. That said, it also attracts a higher number of the skilled pro players than any other tournament. There may only be a couple thousand truly great no-limit hold’em players in the world, but a huge percentage of them will be playing the Main Event. Which makes sense—when you combine the prestige with the huge field of amateurs, you’ll never have a spot with a higher expected value for the skilled players. As the joke goes, they can’t afford not to play.

5. This creates a bizarre dynamic, in which the Main Event is unquestionably the softest high buy-in tournament in the world, perhaps by an order of magnitude, on the first few days. The Main Event is also a freezeout, meaning you can only enter once. Many poker tournaments, including many at the WSOP, are re-entry tournaments, meaning that in the early stages of the event, if you bust you can go buy-in again. Since pros are more likely to re-enter than amateurs, the re-entry tournaments tend to be pro-heavy (imagine 1000 unique players, but each of the 800 pros enter twice; that’s an effective field of 1600 pros you have to beat). That’s not possible in the Main Event, where each pro can only play once. But by the late stages of the tournament, when most of the amateurs have been weeded out and all of the truly terrible players are gone, it usually becomes a very tough field. In recent years, in particular, the final three tables have featured very strong play.

6. As such, the random table draw on Day 1 and, to a lesser degree, the random redraw on Day 2, have a huge impact on your chances of making a deep run and getting into the money. There will be starting tables full of jamokes, that play as soft as a lot of neighborhood home games. And there will also be tables with half a dozen pros. It’s one of the hidden elements of luck in tournament poker, and when you see a pro with a huge stack at the end of Day 1, it’s often because they were able to steamroll of table of players essentially giving away their chips.

7. Another under-appreciated feature of the Main Event is that it really is a test of endurance. Winning entails playing 11 days of poker, the last 8 of them consecutive. Each day is roughly 10 hours of poker and about 2.5 hours of breaks. You start at noon and by the time you bag up and leave each night it’s probably past 1am. It’s an absolute grind. Nor is it trivial to calm down and fall asleep after that much high-stakes poker. Whatever poker skills it takes to win, the soft skills of sleeping well and dealing with exhaustion loom large. As my friend Nate Meyvis vividly wrote in his majestic trip report from the 2011 Main Event:

“Day 6. Wake up at the Gold Coast. Did I sleep well? What time is it? 10 AM? Thank God. Thank God I slept well. It has been three full days of play since the last day off: more than enough to require me to completely structure my daily plans around the tournament. On day 1 you can simply show up, get focused, and play. By now there’s no leaving the poker behind--when we bag up and I leave the Rio well past midnight on day 5, nothing is done. Rather, I have 11 hours to eat twice and sleep and shower, and those things all feel like more moves in the game.”

8. There’s something fundamentally ridiculous about playing a poker tournament that cost $10k to enter. The variance of tournament poker is really high; only 15% of the field gets into the money, and even the best players in the world aren’t favorites to cash any given tournament, including the Main Event. Expected value aside, you really are in some sense lighting ten g’s on fire. But even beyond that, ten grand can just buy you a lot of stuff. Choosing to use it for a seat in a card game entails a level of hedonism that is unusually visceral.

9. I’ve played two high buy-in poker tournaments in my life, though neither on my own dime. I played the 2006 Main Event when I won a mega-satellite online. And I played the $25k PokerStars Players Championship in the Bahamas in 2023 when I won a seat in a poker writing contest. It’s a pretty electric feeling sitting at the table in those events. Sometimes the Main Event is described as “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” That was not my experience. I found the whole thing to be one big adrenaline rush, at the table and away from it. Plenty of terror, but zero boredom. I busted on Day 2 of both events—far out of the money—but I can still vividly recall how incredible it felt to be done with Day 1, still in the tournament but no longer under the stress of playing, and knowing I was coming back tomorrow. A type of euphoria I don’t think I’ve otherwise experienced.

10. Despite that, I don’t really recommend the bucket-list trip to the WSOP for the Main Event for most amateurs. In my view, if you want to go experience the WSOP and have $10k you are willing to put toward buy-ins, it’d be an overall much better experience to go out there for a week or two and play a handful of preliminary events at lower buy-ins. I’ve done this a bunch of times and always had a great time. The entire tournament series is quite a sight to behold, and the experiential difference between playing the Main Event and a $1500 preliminary event isn’t that big. It’s not the same but it’s not far off. Plenty of hedonism and euphoria to go around. And playing 4 or 5 cheaper events gives you a much better chance at a memorable deep run. You’ll also probably play better. One problem a lot of amateurs have in the big buy-in events is playing scared, because they don’t want to bust, especially in the first few hours. But that’s terrible tournament poker, a true self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to risk busting to play well, and getting your eggs all out of one basket makes that a lot easier.

11. As tough as it is to beat 10,000 people and win the Main Event, in theory any idiot with a horseshoe up his ass for two weeks can do it. Best of luck to all my friends entering it this year. Play well and have fun. And I hope you find that horseshoe.

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