The Daily Scoop: Opening the 2023 WSOP
Before the bracelets start flying, the poker world spends a week clearing its throat. The 2023 World Series of Poker opened the way it always does, with a mix of tradition, spectacle, and sidebar stories that have nothing to do with a final table and everything to do with why the summer matters. Here is that opening stretch, condensed: the homecoming, the record chases, the characters, and the housekeeping around the felt.
A Homecoming and a Head Start
The 54th WSOP came home. After years at the Rio and then a stop at Bally’s, the series set up inside the newly rebranded Horseshoe Las Vegas — the name Benny Binion’s family hung on the room where the whole thing started back in 1970. The 2023 edition was the biggest yet on paper: 608 tables across more than 200,000 square feet, 95 live bracelet events (up from 89) plus 34 more online, for 129 in all. The Tournament of Champions moved to opening week, the old Million Dollar Bounty became the $1,000 Mystery Millions, and organizers dangled a genuinely absurd carrot for a record Main Event turnout, a drawing to win a Main Event seat every year for the next three decades.
The unofficial start, though, was not a tournament at all. It was the $25,000 Fantasy Poker Draft, in its twelfth year with Daniel Negreanu as commissioner. Teams draft eight pros in an auction with a $200 budget and score points every time one of their players cashes, with the Main Event paying triple. It has grown from a game among friends into the summer’s starting pistol, complete with cheaper $2,500 and $500 spin-offs for everyone who wants in without five figures on the line.
Two Men Chasing Sevens
The number of the week was seven. Jason Koon got there first, winning his seventh Triton Super High Roller title in the $100,000 Main Event in Cyprus. He did it the hard way, nursing fifteen big blinds at the final table into a heads-up win over Sam Greenwood, and he did it with weight on his mind, dedicating the run to Triton co-founder Ivan Leow, his late friend and the namesake of the tour’s new Player of the Year award. The Cyprus series alone was worth about $3.6 million to him, pushing his career winnings past $47 million.
Daniel Negreanu was chasing a seven of his own, and had been for a while. Six bracelets and more than $50 million in earnings into a Hall of Fame career, he had not won one in Las Vegas since 2008, and none anywhere since a 2013 stop in France. He came agonizingly close in 2019, finishing runner-up twice in a single summer. Kid Poker arrived in 2023 with the same relentless preparation and the same target, hunting the one bracelet that keeps learning how to stay just out of his reach.
The Oldest Hand and the Biggest Pot
Two more records framed the opening days, at opposite ends of the spectrum. The first belonged to Eugene “Gene” Calden, who at 100 years old was set to become the oldest player ever to enter the Main Event, passing the late Jack Ury. Calden came to the game late, finding poker after his wife passed, and turned it into 171 recorded cashes and beloved-regular status at Florida’s Palm Beach Kennel Club before Chris Moneymaker’s tour helped put him in the world championship.
The other record was measured in dollars, and there were a lot of them. On Hustler Casino Live’s “Million Dollar Game,” Tom Dwan won the largest pot in televised poker history: $3,081,000. His pocket queens picked off a full-stack bluff from Wesley Fei, Dwan calling a $786,000 river shove on a board that never paired the way Fei needed. It topped the previous mark, a $1.98 million pot Patrik Antonius had won only three months earlier, and it was a reminder that durrrr, fifteen years after the online nosebleeds made his name, can still be the biggest story in the room.
Around the Felt
Not every story was a headline. A few were housekeeping, and interesting for it.
The WSOP added Badugi as a standalone bracelet event for the first time. The Korean draw game is lowball with a twist, the best possible hand being four cards of four different suits and four different ranks, and after a decade as a fixture in mixed-game rotations it finally earned a bracelet of its own.
The Poker Hall of Fame opened its 2023 nominations to the public, with the usual bar: play the best, for high stakes, past the age of 40, and stand the test of time. Layne Flack had gone in the year before; names still waiting included Brian Rast, Josh Arieh, Michael Mizrachi and Antonio Esfandiari, with Steve O’Dwyer and his $36 million in cashes newly eligible.
And away from the tables, the industry kept grinding forward. In Canada, the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition, eight companies with GGPoker among them, pushed the province to open a regulated online market like the one Ontario launched in 2022, making the case that regulation means both tax revenue and real player protection.
The Summer Before the Summer
None of this is what people remember about a World Series. They remember the bracelet winners and the champion. But the opening week is where the season finds its shape, the traditions, the chases, the characters, and the quiet rule changes that decide what the next two months will look like. In 2023, the felt was barely warm and the stories were already stacking up.
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About the Author: Maury Orton is a poker writer and editor contributing to GGPoker. He focuses on clear, reliable explanations of the game, drawing on years of experience in online poker media and digital publishing.
