What happened
Late registration closed on the CA$5,000 WSOP Super Circuit Canada Main Event at Playground in Kahnawake with 2,844 entries and a prize pool of CA$13,082,400, which is CA$3,082,400 past a guarantee that was already the largest ever offered in a Canadian poker tournament. Day 1A drew 851 entries by itself and Day 1C drew 830. Day 3 finished with Canadian Rayan Chamas on top of the displayed standings with 5,200,000 chips, up from the 825,000 he bagged out of Day 2A, which is a sixfold day and the kind of run that usually gets a nickname. William Givens of the United States is second on 4,000,000 and Jonathan Bussieres of Canada third on 3,400,000. Six of the ten leading stacks are Canadian. The man who led the field into Day 3, a Canadian listed by WSOP LIVE as Mario Lemieux, does not appear in the top ten that came out of it. Day 4 begins today, alongside a CA$25,000 Super High Roller starting at 3pm.
Why it matters
This is the largest prize pool a WSOP Circuit Main Event has ever generated, and it happened at a venue whose previous single-tournament attendance record was 1,978. That record fell earlier in the same festival to a CA$500 Mini Main Event that drew 3,484 entries, an increase of about 76 percent, which suggests the thing Playground was short of all these years was not players but a large enough number written on a poster. Canada has now won seven of the eight Super Circuit Canada ring events whose winners have been published, and holds most of the chips in the ninth.
