If you have been living under a rock somewhere, then it might have passed your attention that the 2026 World Series of Poker has been underway…for the past six weeks. All those tournaments have been a prelude to what literally thousands of people have been waiting for, and Thursday will bring that action to life. Yes, Thursday is the start of the 2026 WSOP $10,000 Championship Event – the “Main Event” – and it will be the focal point of the WSOP from here until its conclusion in August (more on this in a minute).
A Throwback to the Origins
The WSOP Main Event is a throwback to the origins of the most prestigious poker tournament series in the sport’s history. It is the only tournament that has not changed in the last 57 years that the WSOP has been held, and it still has many of the elements that were seen in the first WSOP Main Event all those years ago. The buy-in remains the same for the tournament – $10,000 – and, in an era when there are seemingly endless rebuys into tournaments, the WSOP Main Event maintains the freezeout format – one shot, one chance, and if you lose, you are OUT.
Thursday is Day 1A of the WSOP Main Event, the first of what will be four flights for the tournament. Players will start with a stack of 60,000 chips and play through five 120-minute levels each of the opening days of action. There is one concession that is made to the current world of poker – there is late registration for new players that will be open until the start of Level 7 on the two Day Twos of the tournament.
Day 1B will be held on Friday, Day 1C on Saturday, and Day 1D on Sunday, meaning that the entirety of the field will not join together for some time. The first three Day Ones will come together on Monday (July 6) for Day 2A, while the Day 1D field gets its own dedicated Day 2B (because the final day of Day One flights is normally the biggest of all) on Tuesday (July 7). The survivors from all this action will join in the Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas poker battlegrounds on Wednesday to begin the drive to the next World Champion.
A Legacy of Champions Wandering through Minefields
The WSOP Main Event has become a proving ground for champions who have had to wander through minefields to reach the Promised Land.
It was not that way in the beginning, however. The inaugural WSOP in 1970 did not play a “Main Event”; instead, they chose the champion by vote. The legend is that the players in attendance were asked to vote for the best player, and everyone voted for themselves! To get around this issue, a second vote was held in which players were asked who the SECOND-best player was, and the vote named Johnny Moss as the “champion.”
In 1971, there was a $5,000 tournament conducted, a “winner-take-all” affair, and Moss won that event outright to pocket the $30,000 prize (yes, there were only six players). In 1972, the tournament adopted its $10,000 buy-in and has not adjusted it since (in 2026 dollars, a $10,000 buy-in would translate to roughly $80,000). The “Grand Old Man of the Game” would then become the first to win the Main Event three times, taking down the title again in 1974 by defeating Crandell Addington.
A look back at the early days of the WSOP Main Event reads like a Who’s Who of the poker world, as every winner through the Seventies has been inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame (save for 1979 World Champion Hal Fowler). Among the power players of the Seventies were Doyle Brunson, the first legitimate back-to-back World Champion (1976-1977), and Bobby Baldwin (1978).
Stu Ungar would become the second man to win (on the tables) back-to-back World Championships, picking up his titles in 1980 and 1981; he would join Moss as a three-time champion in winning again in 1997. The first player to earn his way in through the “satellite” system (smaller buy-in tournaments that offered seats in the Main Event), Tom McEvoy, won in 1983, while Johnny Chan came oh-so-close to winning three in a row – he would win back-to-back titles in 1987 and 1988, and was the runner-up to Phil Hellmuth as the 1989 World Champion.
Hellmuth set the record for the youngest-ever World Champion (only 24 at the time) when he won the title, but the “poker boom” of the Aughts saw that record fall. In 2008, Peter Eastgate would eclipse Hellmuth’s achievement (Eastgate was passed in 2009 by Joe Cada), but Hellmuth has proven his excellence in tournament poker since that day in 1989; ‘The Poker Brat’ has accumulated seventeen WSOP bracelets in his career (including a WSOP Europe Main Event title, the only man to have ever done that and the Las Vegas Main Event) while staking his claim to greatest ever WSOP champion.
It is expected that the 2026 WSOP Main Event will at least challenge the numbers from 2025. Last year, 9,735 players came to the felt for the event, making it the third-largest Main Event of all time (only 2023, with 10,043 players, and 2024, with 10,112 entrants, topped 2025’s numbers). It is also expected that defending champion Michael Mizrachi, who has already added his ninth bracelet to his jewelry box in 2026, will be on hand to take on all comers looking to take his crown.
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