The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 99 - The Ninety-Three Percent Edition
We have been wrong about the rake, and we can prove it with our own back numbers. For two weeks this brief has argued that WSOP Online prize pools return exactly 95 percent of face value, and six events held to that to the cent. On August 20 we published the entries and the prize pool for Event #2, the $300 Gladiators of Poker, and never ran the division. Run it now: 17,077 entries at $300 is $5,123,100, and the published pool of $4,764,483 is exactly 93.00 percent of that. Not close to it. Exactly it. There is no single deterministic rake in this series, there are at least two tiers and one event that still divides to 164 percent, and we said otherwise for eleven days. Elsewhere: GTO Wizard finally put a solver on the hand that decided the Main Event and the answer is not the one poker Twitter spent August arguing about. And Caesars Virginia opens Thursday with three times the guarantee we told you it had.
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On August 20 this brief published the final figures for WSOP Online Event #2, the $300 Gladiators of Poker on GGPoker: 17,077 entries and a $4,764,483 prize pool, won by Lucas Teixeira Rodrigues of Brazil for $579,752 and a $30,000 Paradise Super Pass. We noted the field revision from PokerNews, we noted the $278.99 per entry, and we did not run the one calculation we had been running on every other event in the series. Here it is. 17,077 entries at $300 is $5,123,100 in face value. The published prize pool is $4,764,483. That is 93.00 percent, to the cent, with no rounding. Every other event we have tested, from the $500 Mini Main to the $5,000 Championship, in fields from 466 to 12,113, divides to 95.00 percent. Event #5, the $100 Flip and Go, still divides to 164 percent and nobody has explained it. Poker News Daily's August 19 report, citing PokerNews, carries the same 17,077 and $4,764,483 alongside the full payout ladder, including $446,602 for second and $344,383 for Rafael Santanna Barcia in third.
Why it mattersWe built a thesis on six data points and stated it as a rule. The seventh data point, which was sitting in our own August 20 file the entire time, divides to a different number just as exactly. Two clean percentages and one nonsense one is not a deterministic fee structure, it is a tiered one, and a tiered one nobody publishes. That matters more than our embarrassment. A player entering a $300 GGPoker bracelet event is paying seven percent in fees and a player entering the $700 next door is paying five, and the only way to learn that is to divide the numbers yourself after the tournament ends. The buy-in display does not say it. The lobby does not say it. WSOP.com's Paradise release says up to 5 percent is withheld, which is now demonstrably a floor rather than a rate. The correct posture on the Flip and Go is no longer that it is an anomaly against a fixed rule. It is that we do not know what the rule is, and we should stop pretending we did.
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PokerNews published a GTO Wizard breakdown of the defining hand of the 2026 WSOP Main Event on August 31, three and a half weeks after the fact. The hand, per PokerNews: Jumalon limped the button with Q-5 of different suits, Saaskilahti checked his option with jack-three of diamonds, and the flop came ace-king-four with two spades. Saaskilahti check-called four million. The jack of spades turned, giving Saaskilahti third pair and Jumalon a royal flush draw, and Jumalon overbet forty million into twenty million. Saaskilahti called. The six of spades rivered, Saaskilahti checked, and Jumalon bet 180 million into a pot of a hundred, a 180 percent overbet, holding the queen-high spade flush. Saaskilahti tanked and called, shipping 460 million and, effectively, ten million dollars. GTO Wizard's read is that the solver mostly mixes between checking and betting 67 percent of pot on that river, but does include the 180 percent and 214 percent sizings at low frequency, and that Jumalon's 180 percent overbet was the highest-expected-value line available with that hand.
Why it mattersFor most of August the story was the call. Card Player asked in a headline whether it was the worst call in Main Event final table history. PokerNews ran a piece on pros defending it. GipsyTeam called it a fail. Everyone had a take on the guy who called and almost nobody had one on the guy who bet, which is backwards, because the bet is the interesting decision. A 180 percent pot overbet is a sizing most players do not have in their game at all, and the solver keeps it in the mix precisely because it is rare enough to be unfaceable. Jumalon found the maximum with a hand that had been a queen-five limp forty seconds earlier. The hero call debate was always the sideshow. Also worth saying plainly: a solver run three and a half weeks later is not a verdict on a human being in the tank with eight figures on the line, and anyone using this piece to relitigate Saaskilahti is misreading it.
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Card Player's canonical 2026 bracelet-race piece, by Erik Fast, published July 27 and still live, closes with this: bracelet hunters will have to wait until December for their next chances to win a live bracelet event, with WSOP Paradise slated for December 3 to 17, and online bracelet festivals are likely at some point in the fall. Two things about that sentence. First, the word live is doing quiet work, and readers who skim it come away believing the bracelet calendar goes dark for four months. Second, the fall festival that was likely at some point had in fact already run once, on WSOP.com, from May 30 to July 14, thirteen days before the piece published. The GGPoker series then announced on August 7 with 33 bracelets and over $69 million in guarantees and started August 16. The piece has not been updated.
Why it mattersThis is the third outlet in a week where the same shape turns up: online bracelets exist in the news section and vanish from the reference material. We have been careful to call the Poker.Org master list a record-keeping problem rather than a coverage problem, and the same fairness applies here. Erik Fast wrote an excellent leaderboard piece and he wrote it before the GGPoker schedule was public. But it is the page that ranks in search for the 2026 bracelet race, it tells the reader the next bracelet is in December, and 68 bracelets have been or will be awarded between that sentence and Paradise. Nobody is hiding anything. The record is just being assembled by people who all quietly agree that a bracelet won on a laptop is a footnote, and the footnote is now a third of the bracelets.
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The all-time bracelet standings moved more this summer than in any year in recent memory, per Card Player's July 27 tally. Of the 99 live bracelets awarded before the Main Event, 39 went to players who already had one and 27 to players who already had several. Ten players collected number six or better. Benny Glaser took the $50,000 Poker Players Championship out of 108 entries for $1.3 million and his ninth. Four days later Michael Mizrachi won the $10,000 PLO Championship out of 836 for $1,350,203 and his ninth, one year to the day after his fourth PPC. One day after that Shaun Deeb won the $1,500 Eight-Game for his ninth, after three runner-up finishes in heads-up matches earlier in the same series. Nick Schulman and Daniel Negreanu are on eight, Negreanu's arriving via the $100,000 PLO High Roller out of 83 entries for $2,257,718. Calvin Anderson won twice, the $10,000 Razz Championship out of 155 and the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. out of 189, to reach seven. Erik Seidel lost heads-up in the $3,000 PLO six-max and Phil Hellmuth finished second in the $5,000 eight-max to Darren Rabinowitz, leaving Hellmuth on 17.
Why it mattersDeeb told PokerNews he is going to pass Phil, which he has been saying for years, and at 40 with nine he is closer to being right than the joke allows. But look at what the leaderboard is for a second. It is the one place in poker where an online bracelet has always counted the same as a live one, because career totals get assembled from the WSOP's own player database rather than from a media list. Deeb's nine and Mizrachi's nine include hardware won in Las Vegas ballrooms and hardware won at home. That is the correct treatment. It is also the exact opposite of how the same outlets handled 2026's ledger, where 53 bracelets went uncounted. A bracelet is apparently permanent enough to be in your career total forever and provisional enough to be left off this year's list. Pick one.
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This brief has twice told you that the WSOP Circuit's first Virginia stop carries a $500,000 Main Event guarantee. The WSOP's own February 10 announcement says the series carries a guaranteed $1.5 million prize pool across the stop, running Thursday September 3 through Monday September 14 at The Pantheon at Caesars Virginia in Danville, with 18 ring events. The WSOP's own account promoted it as 18 ring events and $1 million-plus in guarantees. The property is a Caesars and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians partnership with a 320-room tower, 90,000 square feet of gaming and a WSOP-branded poker room. Every ring winner takes the standard $5,000 Paradise package with entry to the $2,750 Circuit Championship Mystery Bounty.
Why it mattersWe got a number wrong twice and it is worth saying why. The $500,000 figure came from a stop schedule and the $1.5 million is the series guarantee, and we conflated the two, which is the same error we spent last week documenting in other people's work. The corrected number changes the read on the stop. Virginia is a state with no commercial poker history to speak of, and the WSOP is opening there with a series guarantee three times what we thought and a purpose-built branded room, which is not the posture of a tour testing a market. It is the posture of a tour that has already decided. Watch the first field size on Thursday against $1.5 million and you will know within 48 hours whether the decision was right.
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The Horseshoe Tunica WSOP Circuit ran August 20 to 31 with 18 ring events. It ended yesterday. As of this filing, WSOP.com has published nothing since the Hard Rock Tulsa preview release at 4:00 p.m. Eastern on August 26, which means the entire Tunica series has concluded without a single champion appearing on the WSOP's own news index. Not the Main Event winner. Not one of the eighteen. Two days ago we predicted the site would dump the full slate on or about September 1, on the Atlantic City precedent, where the results appeared the day the series closed. That has not happened. The last Circuit champion WSOP.com named is Brian Luo at Atlantic City on August 25, seven days ago. Meanwhile Hard Rock Tulsa is on day seven of eighteen rings with its $1,700 Main Event starting Friday, and WSOP Super Circuit Canada at Playground opened its CA$2,300 Super Circuit Championship yesterday with a CA$500,000 guarantee and has still published no registration figure for anything.
Why it mattersThree simultaneous Circuit stops, roughly fifty ring events in progress or completed, and the public record for all of it is one Main Event winner from a series that ended a week ago. The Circuit is the WSOP's volume business, the thing that puts the brand in Mississippi and Oklahoma and now Virginia, and it is being documented at roughly one story per twelve days. We keep writing this and it keeps being true, which is its own kind of finding. Tunica is the cleanest test we have had: a complete series, start to finish, eighteen champions, filed under nothing.
The 2026 count is unchanged at 153 awarded: 15 at WSOP Europe in Prague, 100 in Las Vegas, 30 in the WSOP.com US online series and 8 on GGPoker. We are not restating the arithmetic from August 29. One correction to our own file: on August 29 we listed Lucas Teixeira Rodrigues's Event #2 prize as not confirmed, which was wrong, because we published the full figures ourselves on August 20. They are restored below with the 93 percent divide that we should have run then. No new GGPoker bracelet has been published anywhere we can read since Event #2. The $1,500 Millionaire Maker was scheduled to resolve August 31 with $1,000,000 guaranteed to first and we can find no published winner. Event #3, the $2,500 Bounty NLH Championship, has been unresolved on the public record since August 19.
Brazil, playing as 'Fino y Elegante'. Corrected from our August 29 entry, which wrongly carried this as unconfirmed. Entered the final table with 140 big blinds, the largest stack, and never lost the lead. 17,077 entries, $4,764,483 prize pool, which is exactly 93.00 percent of face value and not the 95 percent we have been asserting all series. Plus a $30,000 Paradise Super Pass. Second place took $446,602 with no deal struck; Rafael Santanna Barcia took third for $344,383 and Vladislav Saprykin fourth for $265,561.
Carried, unchanged. 3,607 entries and a $2,398,665 pool, which divides to 95 percent within ten dollars. Listed here today only as the contrast case: same series, same brand, two different rake tiers eleven days apart.
Not a champion. Held the chip lead with 4,754,718 and $19,640 in bounties with 20 left in a 781-entry field when play resumed at 7:00 p.m. BST on August 19, per Poker News Daily citing PokerNews. First place was listed at $127,888. Thirteen days later no winner has been published. Listed to keep the thread open, not to credit a bracelet.
Carried, unchanged and still unresolved. Two of the five open bracelets won by women in 2026 and neither has a published event name, field size or prize on any page we have been able to open.
No chip counts were published anywhere in this window. WSOP.com has published nothing since August 26. GGPoker has no Day 2 chip board on the public record since Event #3 on August 19, and that one is thirteen days stale. Horseshoe Tunica finished yesterday without publishing a stack all series. Hard Rock Tulsa is seven days into eighteen rings with no numbers. WSOP Super Circuit Canada at Playground is a week in, has opened its CA$2,300 Super Circuit Championship with a CA$500,000 guarantee and its CA$5,000 Main Event with a CA$10,000,000 guarantee starts September 3, and it has published no registration figure for a single event. The last real chip count in this brief is Arsenii Karmatckii's, below, and we are carrying it only to mark how old it is.
No new final table has been published in this window. The three players below are from the Event #2 payout ladder reported by Poker News Daily on August 19, citing PokerNews, which we published as a result on August 20 but never broke out as finishes. No live Circuit final table from Tunica, Tulsa or Playground exists on the public record at all.
No deal was struck between the last two players, per PokerNews via Poker News Daily. A $133,150 gap heads-up and both of them played it out, which is worth noting against the eleven-dollar heads-up gap we flagged in Event #1 and called a chop.
Brazil. Started the final table third in chips with 52 big blinds. Brazilian players took first and third in an event Brazil also won the week before.
Russia. Started second in chips with 77 big blinds behind Rodrigues's 140 and could not close. $265,561 from a $300 buy-in is 885 times the entry fee, which is what a 17,077-entry field does to a payout ladder.
Card Player's leaderboard has Deeb at nine bracelets and $14,772,546 in WSOP earnings across 235 cashes. He won the $1,500 Eight-Game this summer after losing three heads-up matches for bracelets earlier in the same series. Told PokerNews he is going to pass Phil, which he has said for years and is eight bracelets from proving.
Won the $50,000 Poker Players Championship out of 108 entries for $1.3 million, his most prestigious title, and reached nine at 37. $7,383,678 in WSOP earnings from 110 cashes, the lowest earnings total of anyone at nine or above, which is what happens when you win mixed games rather than $10,000 hold'em.
Won the $10,000 PLO Championship out of 836 entries for $1,350,203, exactly one year after the fourth Poker Players Championship that preceded his 2025 Main Event win. Second on the all-time WSOP earnings list, about $5.6 million behind Negreanu.
Won the $100,000 PLO High Roller out of 83 entries for $2,257,718, the fourth-largest score of his career and his biggest in a bracelet event. Had already become the first player past $25 million in WSOP earnings before it; now sits at $27,935,999 across 308 cashes.
Became the winningest Razz player in history with his second $10,000 Razz Championship, out of 155 entries for $357,026, then took the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. out of 189 for $413,580 four days later. Now in a seven-way tie at seven with Seiver, Arieh, Hennigan, Baxter, Rast and Men Nguyen.
Finished second in the $5,000 Eight-Max to Darren Rabinowitz, who took his second bracelet and denied Hellmuth an 18th. Erik Seidel also lost heads-up this summer, in the $3,000 PLO six-max to Joshua Wang, and stays on ten.