The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 93 - Three Stops Open at Once Edition
The bracelet we have been chasing for four days has a name. Stefan Schillhabel won WSOP Online Event #5, the $100 Flip & Go, and the name did not surface on WSOP.com or PokerNews. It surfaced on a sportsbook affiliate blog. Two other online champions were sitting in the same piece unreported anywhere else. Then the numbers get interesting: two of the three events divide out to exactly 95 percent of face value, which is the fee, and the Flip & Go does not divide out at all. Meanwhile three WSOP Circuit stops are running simultaneously as of this morning, Hard Rock Tulsa opened with 18 rings and not one published guarantee, and the schedule PokerNews published for the online series has nine dates in it that say August when they mean September, including one that claims a $10,000 championship fires today.
Story 01 of 6
WSOP Online Event #5, the $100 Flip & Go, concluded on August 22 with a $1,000,000 guarantee attached. Four consecutive briefs logged it as an unnamed champion. BettingNews published the answer on Tuesday morning: Stefan Schillhabel of Austria beat Neville Costa of Brazil heads-up for $150,740 from a reported 7,277 entries and a $1,195,005 prize pool. It is Schillhabel's second WSOP bracelet and both have come online at GGPoker. The same piece carries two more champions nobody else has written: Nikita Kalinin, a Russian resident of Mexico, won the $2,500 Bounty No-Limit Hold'em Championship from 781 entries and a $1,854,875 pool for $127,888 in prize money plus $148,351 in bounties, a combined $276,239. Daniel Vicente of the Dominican Republic won the $1,000 Mystery Bounty Pot-Limit Omaha from 771 entries and a $732,450 pool for $54,311 plus $45,130 in bounties. Each of them also collects a $30,000 Super Pass into the $26,000 WSOP Paradise Super Main Event in December, per GGPoker's promotional terms as reported by PokerNews.
Why it mattersThree gold bracelets, more than $3.7 million in combined prize pools, and the only outlet on the record is a betting affiliate whose author bio says he is an avid basketball fan. WSOP.com's news index has published nothing since August 20. PokerNews' 2026 WSOP hub still lists the Emerson obituary and an 888poker documentary as its most recent items. This is not a small series either: the 2026 WSOP Online runs August 16 through September 29 and awards 33 bracelets, more than the entire WSOP Europe and Paradise calendars combined. A third of a year's gold is being handed out in a six-week window that the two biggest poker outlets are covering at a rate of roughly zero.
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Run the same arithmetic we ran on Atlantic City yesterday. Kalinin's $2,500 Bounty Championship: 781 entries, $1,854,875 pool, which is $2,375.00 per entry, exactly 95 percent of $2,500. Vicente's $1,000 Mystery Bounty PLO: 771 entries, $732,450 pool, which is $950.00 per entry, exactly 95 percent of $1,000. Both land on the number to the cent, which matches the WSOP's own published terms that up to 5 percent of buy-ins is withheld for staff and operational costs. Now the Flip & Go: 7,277 entries at $100 should produce $691,315 at the same 95 percent, which would be a $308,685 overlay against the $1,000,000 guarantee. The reported pool is $1,195,005, which works out to $164.21 per entry, or 164 percent of the buy-in. Working backwards, a $1,195,005 pool at 95 percent implies 12,579 entries, which is 5,302 more than reported.
Why it mattersOne of those two numbers is wrong, or the Flip & Go pool contains money the entry count does not explain. Flip & Go is a two-stage format where players buy in, play a single all-in flip, and survivors advance to the Go stage, so it is plausible that 7,277 counts one stage and the pool counts the other. That is a guess and we are not printing it as a fact. What we can print is that the method works: it landed to the cent on both of the events published alongside it, and it does not land here. If a $100 tournament with 7,277 entries really did produce $1,195,005, the WSOP beat its guarantee by $195,005 in a field that should not have gotten there, which would be the most interesting thing about the event and nobody has explained it. Ask the arithmetic and it tells you to go ask GGPoker.
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PokerNews' full 33-event table for the 2026 WSOP Online, published August 6 and last updated August 7, is internally broken from Event #15 onward. The series runs August 16 through September 29 by the article's own opening paragraph. The table dates Event #15, the $1,000 Rounder Cup, to 'Sun 6 Aug', which is ten days before the series starts. It then dates Event #26 to 'Sat 19 Aug', #27 to 'Sun 20 Aug', #28, the $5,000 Main Event Day 2 with a $25,000,000 guarantee, to 'Mon 21 Aug', #30 to 'Thu 24 Aug', #31, the $10,000 Heads-Up NLH Championship, to 'Sat 26 Aug', #32 to 'Sun 27 Aug' and #33, the $10,000 GGMillion$ High Rollers Day 2, to 'Mon 28 Aug'. All eight of those fall after Event #29, which is correctly dated 'Tue 22 Sep'. Every one of them should read September. The guarantee column is also wrong twice: Event #1 lists a guarantee of '$700', which is its buy-in, and Event #29 lists '$25,000', which is also its buy-in. Event #29's name is spelled 'Champoionship'.
Why it mattersToday is August 26. A player who trusts the largest poker news site on earth thinks the $10,000 Heads-Up Championship fires tonight. It fires on September 26. The Main Event Day 2 that table puts on August 21 is on September 21, a month out, and it is the single largest guarantee in the series. Nineteen days after publication and nineteen days after a listed update, the errors are still live. We spent yesterday's brief on the WSOP publishing a buy-in column that disagreed with its own event names for twelve days. This is the same failure at the other end of the industry, in the outlet that exists to catch it.
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The WSOP Circuit opened at Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa in Catoosa, Oklahoma this morning with Event #1, a $400 No-Limit Hold'em Opener Double Stack at 11 a.m., and runs through September 7. The full 18-event schedule is live on WSOP.com. Not one event on it carries a guarantee. Not the $1,700 Main Event with its two flights on September 4 and 5, not the $400 Mini Main with four flights, not the $400 Monster Stack with three. Compare the same property's peers: the January Tunica stop published a $500,000 guarantee on its Main Event and printed GTD figures on nine separate events. The April Tunica stop published $400,000. Atlantic City published $600,000. Caesars Virginia, announced this week for September, published $500,000. Tulsa published nothing. The schedule also has two visible errors on the WSOP's own page. The September 5 row is numbered 'Event#11' while its text reads 'WSOPC Event #14: $1,700 NLH Main Event - Flight B', and Event #12's Clock column, which every other row fills with a number of minutes, instead reads 'Start of Lvl 9', the same text as the late registration column beside it.
Why it mattersA guarantee is a promise that costs the operator money when the field misses it. Publishing eighteen events without one is a decision, and it is the decision you make when you are not confident about the room. It also caps the stop hard: fifteen of the eighteen events are $400 or less, the ceiling outside the Main Event is $600, and there is no high roller at all. Atlantic City ran a $2,200. Virginia will run a $2,200. Tulsa is a $400 series with a $1,700 Main attached, opening on the same morning as a Canadian festival advertising a $10,000,000 guarantee. The Circuit is not one product anymore.
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As of this morning the WSOP has three live Circuit series on three separate schedules. Horseshoe Tunica is on day seven of an 18-ring stop that runs through August 31. Hard Rock Tulsa opened today and runs to September 7. WSOP Super Circuit Canada opened today at Playground in Kahnawake with two flights of the $500 Kickoff at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. and runs to September 12. On September 3 a fourth joins them: Caesars Virginia in Danville hosts the Circuit's first Virginia stop, September 3 to 14, with 18 ring events, more than $1.5 million guaranteed, a $1,700 Main Event with a $500,000 guarantee starting September 10, a $600 Mini Main with $250,000, a $400 Monster Stack with $150,000 and a $2,200 High Roller with $100,000. Layered underneath all of it, the 33-bracelet WSOP Online festival runs on GGPoker through September 29. Between September 3 and September 7 there will be four live ring stops and an online bracelet series running at the same time.
Why it mattersThe Circuit has stopped being a tour and started being a grid. Four concurrent stops means four simultaneous ring pools, which means the value of a ring is being diluted at exactly the moment the WSOP has attached a $5,000 Paradise package to every one of them. It also explains the coverage vacuum we keep documenting: there is no version of PokerNews or WSOP.com that can staff four live series, an online festival and a results database at once, and the thing that gets dropped is the champion who won at 2 a.m. in Catoosa. Virginia is the interesting one on merit, a brand-new market with real guarantees, and it opens into the most crowded week the Circuit calendar has ever had.
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Yesterday we resolved the buy-in on the WSOP Super Circuit Canada Main Event at $5,000 and left the currency open. It is Canadian. WSOP.com's own preview piece prices the series in CAD, PokerNews headlined it 'over CAD $14M' in June, and Pokerfuse reports the Main Event as a CAD $5,000 buy-in with a CAD $10,000,000 guarantee. Now read the wires. The original announcement went out through CNW from Montreal on August 3 under the headline 'More Than $14 Million in Guaranteed Prize Pools' and describes 'the $5,000 Main Event, featuring a $10,000,000 guaranteed prize pool, the largest guarantee ever offered in a Canadian poker tournament.' No currency marker anywhere in it. The August 20 GlobeNewswire release repeats the same figures the same way. Two press releases, one of them issued from Montreal in English and French, announcing the largest guarantee in Canadian poker history without once naming the dollar.
Why it mattersThe distinction is the whole story for anyone deciding whether to fly. A Canadian dollar is not an American one, and a US player reading '$10,000,000' on a wire is reading a materially larger number than what will be in the pool. It is also the difference between the honest version of the claim and the marketing version. In CAD, 'largest guarantee ever offered in a Canadian poker tournament' is a clean, true, Canada-scoped fact. Strip the currency out and drop it into an American feed and it reads as a $10 million guarantee at a $5,000 buy-in, which would be one of the most aggressive numbers ever posted at that price anywhere. GGPoker knows which reading travels further. The exact USD equivalent is not published in any release we can find, and we are not going to invent an exchange rate to fill the gap.
Three WSOP Online champions are on the record today, all of them via a single BettingNews piece published Tuesday and none of them via WSOP.com or PokerNews. Event #5, the $100 Flip & Go, was carried as unresolved in four consecutive briefs and is now answered. We are not publishing a revised calendar-year total. Prior briefs tracked 104 and projected the Flip & Go as 105, but with 33 online bracelets scheduled between August 16 and September 29 and no public running tally we can verify, any number we print would be a guess. Circuit rings at Tunica, Tulsa and Playground are not bracelets and carry zero Player of the Year points.
Austria. Beat Neville Costa of Brazil heads-up. Reported at 7,277 entries and a $1,195,005 prize pool against a $1,000,000 guarantee, a pair of figures that do not reconcile at the standard 5 percent fee. Second career bracelet, both won online at GGPoker. Collects a $30,000 Super Pass into the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event in December. Concluded August 22 and went unnamed anywhere for three days.
Russian, resident in Mexico and listed under the Mexican flag. First bracelet. 781 entries, $1,854,875 pool, which divides to exactly $2,375 per entry. Beat Audrius Stakelis heads-up by one dollar of tournament prize money, $127,888 to $127,887, which is what a chop looks like when the bounties are left in the middle. His bounty income exceeded his prize money.
Dominican Republic. First bracelet after finishing runner-up at the 2025 WSOP. 771 entries, $732,450 pool, exactly $950 per entry. Beat Renan Bruschi of Brazil heads-up.
The only final tables published anywhere today are the three WSOP Online events reported by BettingNews. No live Circuit final table from Tunica, Tulsa or Playground exists on the public record.
Brazil. Lost heads-up to Stefan Schillhabel for the bracelet, finishing $32,587 back in the largest field of the series so far.
Cyprus. Finished exactly one dollar behind Nikita Kalinin in tournament prize money and $140,164 behind once bounties are counted. The bounty column, not the payout column, decided this tournament.
Argentina. Third from 781 entries in an $1,854,875 prize pool.
Brazil. Lost heads-up to Daniel Vicente. Four of the seven players at this final table were Brazilian.
Mexico. Turned a $100 buy-in into 726 times its face value and still finished fourth.
Carried from the WSOP leaderboard as last read, not re-verified today, and nothing that has happened since would move it. Online bracelets score zero Player of the Year points under the rule on wsop.com/player-of-the-year, and Circuit rings score zero. Three bracelets were awarded this week and the leaderboard did not notice any of them.
Twenty-two points back with no POY-eligible event on the calendar between now and WSOP Paradise in December. Carried, unchanged.
Alex Foxen under his legal name on the WSOP leaderboard. Seven behind Kihara. Also Card Player's outright POY leader on a separate leaderboard with a separate points system. Carried, unchanged.
Won a gold bracelet from a $1,195,005 prize pool four days ago and scores nothing on the leaderboard carrying a $1,000,000 prize. He does get a $30,000 Super Pass into the $26,000 Paradise Super Main Event, which is worth more than most POY finishing positions pay and is also, conveniently, an entry into the festival where the POY race gets decided.
The online festival will hand out 33 bracelets between August 16 and September 29 and every one of them is worth zero POY points. Paradise in December will hand out 20 that count. A player chasing Deeb has nothing to chase until the Bahamas, which is either elegant scheduling or a race that has been over since July.