The 2026 World Series of Poker burst back into life on Tuesday at the Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas, where cards hit the felt at noon for Event #1, the $550 Mini Mystery Millions, signalling the start of poker’s richest and most prestigious summer. The 57th edition of the WSOP runs through 15 July across 100 gold-bracelet events, but organisers handed the honour of the series opener to a brand-new tournament built around a single tantalising promise: a $550 (roughly £435) buy-in that could turn into a $1 million (about £790,000) mystery bounty for one fortunate player. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of democratic, life-changing hook the WSOP loves to lead with.
Reigning Main Event champion Michael Mizrachi, who banked a $10 million top prize last summer, was given the ceremonial “Shuffle Up and Deal” before the opening hands, with Jack Effel of WSOP Poker Operations kickstarting the festivities. The choice of the Mini Mystery Millions as the curtain-raiser is a deliberate one. In 2025 the comparable $1,000 Mystery Millions drew a staggering 19,654 entries, and by slicing the buy-in nearly in half while keeping the headline $1 million bounty intact, the WSOP is openly courting one of the largest tournament fields the game has ever seen. Featuring multiple Day 1 flights running daily through 30 May, a 25,000 starting stack and a re-entry format friendly to satellite qualifiers who can punch in for as little as $60 online, the event is engineered for volume. Standard payouts begin on Day 1, but the mystery envelopes — and the chance to unzip a seven-figure score — do not come into play until Day 2 on 31 May.
While the masses chased the bounty, the summer’s first serious test of pedigree was already taking shape across the room in Event #2, the $5,000 (roughly £3,950) No-Limit Hold’em 8-Handed. By the close of play it was Brazil’s Yuri Dzivielevski who bagged the Day 1 chip lead, an early statement from one of the most decorated tournament players of his generation and a reminder that the bracelet-hunting elite waste no time. The presence of a player of Dzivielevski’s calibre at the front of the field on day one underlines how quickly the WSOP separates the curious from the contenders.
This year’s series arrives with more than just new events on the felt. Six tournaments are new for 2026, headlined by the Mini Mystery Millions and the 10,000GGMillion High Roller, alongside additions such as the $1,500 Pick Your PLO and the $500 Summer Saver. Off the table, the WSOP has overhauled its broadcast presence, introducing a daily live stream on its YouTube channel running free of charge from the opening day through to the Main Event, supported by a refreshed on-air team that includes Maria Ho, David Williams, Joe Stapleton and Jeff Platt, with Ali Nejad and Poker Hall of Famer Nick Schulman returning to the booth. A new streaming partnership with the Asian Poker Tour and, for the first time, a WSOP Circuit stop running concurrently in Las Vegas from 14–25 July round out an unusually busy slate.
For the broader poker world, the significance is hard to overstate. The WSOP remains the sport’s defining stage, having awarded more than $4 billion in prize money across six decades, and a strong opening turnout sets the tone for whether 2026 can match the record-breaking numbers posted last year. The summer’s marquee attraction, the $10,000 (roughly £7,900) No-Limit Hold’em Main Event, begins on 2 July across four starting flights, with the WSOP reviving a delayed final table in the spirit of the old “November Nine” era and an eventual broadcast on ESPN. The Player of the Year race, which carries $1 million in prizes across its top 100 finishers, sees Shaun Deeb defending the crown he claimed in 2025.
For now, attention stays fixed on the felt. The Mini Mystery Millions flights continue daily through 30 May before survivors return on 31 May to begin cracking open those bounty envelopes, while fresh bracelet events launch almost every day from here to mid-July. Forty-nine days of poker stretch out ahead, and after a single afternoon the summer’s first chip leaders are already pulling away — but in a series this long, the players counting their stacks tonight know better than anyone that the real story has barely begun to deal itself out.