WSOP misses $50 million guarantee, biggest ever in poker history

Posted on: December 16, 2024 18:15 PST

Nobody could accuse the WSOP of lacking ambition. The $50 million guarantee it slapped on the 2024 Super Main Event was by far the largest in poker history.

The WPT held that record last year and missed the $40,000,000 guarantee on its World Championship by $2,400,000.

Undeterred, the WSOP slapped another $10 million on top of that figure and came mighty close to making it. On Paradise Island in The Bahamas, the $25K buy-in Super Main Event field merged for Day 2 on Monday, with four Day 1 flights and Day 2 late reg growing it to 1,378 entries.

The WSOP needed 2,000 entries total, and some were predicting a monster overlay. That saw pros firing multiple bullets in a bid to build a stack. We heard rumors of one player firing nine bullets in total across the various Day 1 flights. On Day 2, multiple pros fired bullets and bust short stacks almost instantaneously. Others managed to spin up and survive.

Daniel Negreanu: One of the biggest stacks in the Day 2 field.

Online players boost the numbers

But what a lot of players didn't seem to realize is that 600 players had already played online Day 1 flights on GGPoker (with 90 making it straight through to Day 3 on Tuesday). Add them to the 1,378 live players and you get the official final total of 1,978, just 22 players shy of the 2,000 the WSOP needed.

That means an overlay of just $550,000. 'Just' might be doing some heavy lifting there but when you consider some players were predicting an overlay of anywhere up to $10,000,000, the WSOP will likely be very happy with that result.

Day 2 is still ongoing but play is on the bubble with just a few more eliminations needed to end play relatively early. The entire field will then merge for the first time on Day 3. Play will restart at midday ET on Tuesday and we'll be back on the floor bringing you all the biggest moments in our Instant coverage.

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