The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 82
Raoul Kanme won the biggest tournament that finished anywhere yesterday, a $1,250,000 career-best in North Cyprus that came with a hand where his queens beat kings and two more where pocket tens decided the podium in both directions. Meanwhile the schedule for a series that starts tomorrow morning has eight rows printed in the wrong month, twenty-three of its thirty-three events have no published guarantee at all, and the two outlets covering it disagree on three buy-ins. The WSOP announced a C$10,000,000 Main Event guarantee that needs two thousand entries to clear even if the house takes nothing. And PokerStars quietly removed a million-dollar jackpot from its $5 game right after that jackpot hit three times in twenty-seven days.
Story 01 of 7
Kanme, a Dutch player whose previous best was a $157,368 runner-up in a EUR 3,000 event at last year's Master Classics of Poker, closed out the 2026 Onyx Super High Roller Series $25,000 Main Event at the Merit Royal Diamond in North Cyprus on Friday. 255 entries built a $6,120,000 prize pool against a $5,000,000 guarantee. He scored the final three knockouts himself. The hands that got him there: queens beat Anze Smajd's kings when the board came Q-6-6-A-4 and Kanme made queens full, sending Smajd out eighth for $171,000. Then Kanme won both sides of pocket tens on consecutive knockouts. His Q-J outflipped Aliaksandr Shylko's tens to bust the 2023 PSPC champion in fourth for $420,000, and moments later his own tens held against Jordan Woodall's ace-king to send Woodall out third for a career-high $600,000. He took better than a 7-to-1 lead heads-up against Matthias Lipp and closed it when Lipp shoved six big blinds with K-3 suited into Kanme's A-3 and missed. Lipp got $800,000, his largest score by more than half a million dollars. Kanme's lifetime earnings are now near $2.4 million, meaning this one tournament is more than half of everything he has ever made.
Why it mattersEvery big field high roller produces a story about how a stranger beat the regulars, and this one is real: the nine-handed final table Kanme led from the start included two-time bracelet winner Fahredin Mustafov, bracelet winner and $17.1 million career earner Daniel Rezaei, and Manuel Fritz with nearly $7.5 million in cashes. Kanme knocked out the last three players standing. But the more interesting fact in the payout column is what it says about the top of this format. Kanme's win moved him to 1,588 Card Player Player of the Year points, which puts him inside the top 250. Rezaei's sixth-place finish, worth $250,000 and 476 points, moved him to 6,052 and fifth overall. One tournament made Kanme's career and barely moved his ranking. That is what a $25,000 buy-in does now: the money at the top is enormous and the points structure still assumes you are going to show up fifty more times this year.
Story 02 of 7
The 2026 WSOP Online opens tomorrow, August 16, on GGPoker and runs to September 29 with 33 bracelet events. We went through the schedule table PokerNews published on August 6 and updated August 7, and cross-checked every weekday against every date. Eight rows carry an August date that is impossible. Event #15 is listed 'Sun 6 Aug,' but August 6 was a Thursday. Event #26 is 'Sat 19 Aug,' a Wednesday. Event #27 is 'Sun 20 Aug,' a Thursday. Event #28, the $5,000 Main Event Day 2 with the $25,000,000 guarantee, is listed 'Mon 21 Aug,' which was a Friday. Events #30, #31, #32 and #33 are listed Thu 24 Aug, Sat 26 Aug, Sun 27 Aug and Mon 28 Aug, which were a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Move all eight to September and every single weekday resolves correctly: Sun 6 Sep, Sat 19 Sep, Sun 20 Sep, Mon 21 Sep, Thu 24 Sep, Sat 26 Sep, Sun 27 Sep, Mon 28 Sep. The dates and weekdays are right. Only the month token is wrong, in eight places, and it drops the back half of the series into a window that has already happened. Pokerfuse, covering the same schedule on August 11, puts the Main Event on September 21, which matches.
Why it mattersAs printed, the table tells a reader that the WSOP Online Main Event Day 2 already played five days before the series begins. It also runs backwards: event #25 is Thursday September 17 and event #26 is the row immediately below it, dated August 19. Nobody is going to miss the Main Event because of this, because the client will show the right time and GGPoker runs the lobby. But the schedule table is the artifact people screenshot, sort, and plan a six-week bankroll around, and it is the only version of this series most readers will ever look at in one piece. The reason we caught it is not that we are clever. It is that the table prints the weekday next to the date, which means it audits itself, and nobody ran the audit.
Story 03 of 7
We counted the guarantee column on the same table. Ten events carry a real published guarantee: $3,000,000 for the $300 Gladiators, $1,000,000 for the $100 Flip and Go, $5,000,000 for the $500 Mini Main, ¥25,000,000 for the WSOP Asia Championship, $5,000,000 for the $1,500 Millionaire Maker, $10,000,000 for Mystery Millions, $5,000,000 for the Colossus, $2,000,000 for PLOSSUS, $25,000,000 for the Main Event and $10,000,000 for the GGMillion$ High Rollers. The nine dollar figures add to exactly $66,000,000. Two more rows have something in the guarantee column that is not a guarantee: Event #1, tomorrow's $700 Kick-Off, lists its guarantee as '$700,' and Event #29, the $25,000 High Roller, lists its guarantee as '$25,000.' Both are the buy-in, pasted one column over. The remaining 21 rows are blank. That is 23 of 33 bracelet events with nothing published, the day before the series opens. Separately, the two outlets covering this schedule do not agree on three buy-ins. PokerNews has Mystery Millions at $2,500, pokerfuse has it at $250. PokerNews has the Colossus at $400, pokerfuse has $550. PokerNews has PLOSSUS at '£400' with a dollar-denominated guarantee, pokerfuse has $550 and spells it PLOSUS. Event #29's name is printed 'Champoionship.'
Why it mattersThis is the fourth consecutive brief we have flagged the blank guarantee column, and the number has gotten worse rather than better, because on closer reading two of the twelve rows we previously counted as filled are just the buy-in in the wrong cell. A guarantee is the only number that tells a player whether an event is worth entering before the field exists. For 23 events, including every non-marquee bracelet on the schedule, that number does not exist publicly with one day to go. And the $250 versus $2,500 disagreement on Mystery Millions is a factor of ten on a tournament with a $10,000,000 guarantee. One of those numbers is wrong and a reader has no way to tell which. Worth noting for the record: pokerfuse's writeup promises the series will 'pay out more than $350,000,000 in prize money.' PokerNews sources that same figure differently and correctly, as what the 2025 edition actually paid. Last year's result is not this year's promise.
Story 04 of 7
The WSOP published a promotional piece on Friday for the first-ever WSOP Super Circuit Canada, at Playground in Kahnawake, Quebec, running August 26 through September 12 with 18 ring events and more than CAD $14,000,000 in total guarantees. The centerpiece is a CAD $5,000 Main Event carrying a CAD $10,000,000 guarantee, which the WSOP calls the largest guarantee in Canadian poker history and which runs September 3 to 11 across six starting flights. That single event is roughly 71 percent of the entire festival's guaranteed money. Playground has the two relevant records: the largest WSOP Circuit Main Event field ever, 2,401 entries in 2018, and the largest WSOP Circuit Main Event prize pool ever, CAD $4,450,500 from 1,978 entries in August 2025, won by Jacob Hobday for CAD $620,000 off a CAD $75 satellite. Note that the dates moved: Flushdraw reported this series in June as August 24 to September 9. The WSOP's Friday article and the official press release both say August 26 to September 12.
Why it mattersDo the floor arithmetic, because it does not require assuming anything about rake. At CAD $5,000 per entry, hitting CAD $10,000,000 requires 2,000 entries even if the house takes literally nothing and every dollar goes to the prize pool. It does take something, so the real number is higher, probably north of 2,200. Playground's all-time record field is 2,401, set in 2018 at a buy-in nobody in this coverage has published. Its record prize pool came from 1,978 entries last August. So the guarantee asks a room to beat its own recent field size at a buy-in that is materially larger, and to get within striking distance of a record it set eight years ago. That is not impossible, and Playground is the one venue on the continent with the receipts to attempt it. But it is a real number with a real overlay risk attached, and the operator's framing is five reasons to make the trip. One other thing worth reading twice: the WSOP's article writes 'CAD $500,000,' 'CAD $500' and 'CAD $2,300' in one paragraph and then writes the Main Event guarantee as '$10,000,000' with no currency label at all. The gap between C$10 million and US$10 million is not a rounding error, and it appears on the one number the whole series is selling.
Story 05 of 7
In Thursday's brief we reported that the WSOP Circuit opened at Harrah's Resort Atlantic City that morning and that WSOP.com had published nothing about it, with the operator's news index frozen since August 6 and its top-ranking Atlantic City article dated August 2025. The first half held up. The second did not, and the correction is worth printing: WSOP.com published 'Harrah's Atlantic City Kicks Off WSOP Circuit Series' at 9:00 a.m. EST on August 13, roughly ninety minutes after we filed. It is a real preview with real detail and it fills gaps our own reporting had flagged. Two things in it resolve open questions we have been carrying. First, ring winners do get WSOP Paradise packages this year, specifically $5,000 packages including entry to the WSOP Circuit Championship and hotel, which our August 13 brief listed as unconfirmed because the 2025 articles promised them and the 2026 pages had not mentioned them. Second, the Main Event has three Day 1 flights, August 20, 21 and 22 at 11 a.m., with one re-entry per flight. The WSOP also corrects Card Player on the opener: Card Player's schedule listed the $300,000-guaranteed four-day event as a $400 buy-in, and the WSOP calls it the $500 Mini Main. The operator published a second piece the next day on Super Circuit Canada, so the news index has now moved twice in two days after a week of silence.
Why it mattersWe publish before the news day is over, which means sometimes the news day answers us. The honest read is that our complaint was about ninety minutes premature and the underlying point still stands: the Cherokee stop opened August 6 and, ten days in with the series ending Monday, WSOP.com, Card Player and PokerNews have still published zero individual ring winners from it. An operator posting a preview on the morning a series opens is the floor, not the ceiling. The thing that would actually help a player choosing between two overlapping $1,700 Circuit Main Events this week is results from the one that started first, and that still does not exist anywhere.
Story 06 of 7
Per pokerfuse, a $5 Spin and Go hit the 240,000x multiplier on August 12, creating a $1.2 million prize pool. The UK's 'Gwaugh1' took the $1,000,000, Hungary's 'Kepes897' got $120,000, and Denmark's 'g3t real,' whose reaction in table chat was 'Is this serious?', got $80,000. It was the third $1.2 million jackpot at the $5 level in 27 days, after Denmark's 'dillerfar19' on July 17 and Argentina's 'Anatsuk334' on July 26. All three came in the $5 game. The published odds on that multiplier are one in 10 million. For context on how far outside normal this is: PokerStars had two of these jackpots in all of 2024 and one in all of 2025. It just matched that three-year total in under a month. Pokerfuse ran the math and, assuming a hypothetical 100,000 $5 Spin and Gos per day, the 27-day window produces about 2.7 million games, an expected 0.27 jackpots, and roughly a 0.27 percent chance of seeing three or more. Two further details from the same report. The $1.2 million jackpot was a promotional addition to the $5 game rather than its standard top prize, which is normally $50,000. And as of pokerfuse's writing, PokerStars has removed the 240,000x multiplier from the $5 game and returned its maximum prize to $50,000. Million-dollar jackpots remain live at $100 and above.
Why it mattersNothing here establishes that anything was wrong, and pokerfuse is careful to say so. Random events cluster. A promotion ending on schedule looks identical to a promotion being switched off. But the sequence is the sequence: an operator adds a 240,000x multiplier to its cheapest Spin and Go, the multiplier hits three times in four weeks against odds that predict roughly a quarter of one hit, and then the multiplier goes away. Somebody at PokerStars either priced that promotion against volume assumptions that did not hold, or has an insurance arrangement nobody outside the company knows about, or watched three million-dollar prize pools leave the building against a game generating a fraction of that in rake and made a decision. The company has not said which, and the number that would settle it, how many $5 Spin and Gos actually get played, is the one number PokerStars does not publish. This lands, incidentally, three days after the same company told the market its fields were thin.
Story 07 of 7
The Italian cash game grinder reached the final table of the $10,400 Premiere, then finished runner-up to David Coleman in the $15,300 6-Max on Thursday for $181,000, then finished seventh in the $25,000 Main Event on Friday for $200,000. The 6-Max was originally a two-day event, changed to one day, and ran into the early hours; 62 entries made an $892,800 prize pool with nine paid and a $30,000 min-cash. Coleman closed it out when his K-6 held against Modena's Q-9 and rivered a king anyway. It was Coleman's second title of 2026 after the U.S. Poker Open in April and pushed his year's live cashes past $2 million, per The Hendon Mob. Modena's Main Event exit the next day: pocket kings into Matthias Lipp's pocket aces, no help. Coleman, for his part, entered the Main Event too and finished 33rd.
Why it mattersModena banked $381,000 across two days and lost both hands that would have changed his week, one of them to a river king and the other to the only hand that beat him. That is the actual texture of a high roller series and it almost never gets written up, because the format of tournament coverage is one story per winner. The player having the best week in North Cyprus won nothing. Worth noting for the record-keepers: Card Player's Main Event writeup lists both Eelis Parssinen and Weiran Pu as finishing 12th in its deep-runners paragraph. One of them did not.
All from the $25,000 Onyx Super High Roller Series Main Event final table in North Cyprus, which played to a finish Friday. 255 entries, $6,120,000 prize pool against a $5,000,000 guarantee, top 38 paid.
Largest score of his career by more than half a million dollars. Got aces to hold against Italo Modena's kings seven-handed, then took a better than 7-to-1 deficit into heads-up and shoved six big blinds with K-3 suited into Kanme's A-3.
Career high. Won the first knockout of the final table with kings, then busted Manuel Fritz with kings and a flush, then lost ace-king to Kanme's pocket tens.
The 2023 PokerStars Players Championship winner, whose $3.1 million PSPC score is still his biggest by a distance. His pocket tens lost a flip to Kanme's Q-J.
Committed most of his stack with A-J, called off the rest against Woodall's kings, and watched a four-club board make Woodall a king-high flush. Now near $7.5 million lifetime.
Ninth final table of 2026 for the Austrian. Lost top two pair to a king-high straight, then his pocket nines to Shylko's Q-J when the board ran out with four clubs. 476 POY points move him to 6,052 and fifth overall. Career haul now past $17.1 million.
Third final table of the series for the Italian, one day after finishing runner-up to David Coleman in the $15,300 6-Max for $181,000. Busted here with pocket kings into Lipp's pocket aces.
Got it in with pocket kings against Kanme's pocket queens and lost when the board came Q-6-6-A-4 and Kanme made queens full. The hand that made Kanme's stack.
The two-time bracelet winner was first out, 10-3 suited into Woodall's pocket kings. Picked up a gutshot on the turn and bricked the river.
Cashed 33rd here the day after winning the $15,300 6-Max for $270,000, his second title of 2026 and the result that pushed his year past $2 million in live cashes.
Verified today. Sixth place in the Onyx Main Event added 476 points and $250,000. Ninth final table of 2026. His only title this year is a $60,000 event at Triton Jeju for a career-best $1.9 million.
Last figure we verified is 7,109 points and we found no refreshed full leaderboard today. Rezaei at 6,052 in fifth is the only fresh datapoint we have, and it is consistent with Foxen still leading.
The 1,428 points from the biggest win of his life put him inside the top 250 and nowhere near the top of the board. A useful illustration of what a single $25,000 score does and does not do in a volume-weighted race.
Won the $15,300 6-Max on Thursday for $270,000, his second title of the year after the U.S. Poker Open in April. Card Player did not publish a points figure for the 6-Max in the coverage we found.
Last verified figure 3,410 points. The Main Event finished ten days ago and we still cannot confirm official WSOP POY points for it have posted. Seventh consecutive brief flagging this.
No new tournament activity in our sources since the ESPN finale. None of the 33 WSOP Online bracelets or the 20 Paradise bracelets have a published POY point value, so the rest of his 2026 remains unquantifiable.