Just 59 players remain in the inaugural WSOP Paradise Main Event as the Day 3 players look to make Thursday’s final table. It’s a good race at the top of the leaderboard as Henrique Lessa is in the pole position with 8.640 million chips, followed closely by 2023 WSOP Main Event third-place finisher Adam Walton with 8.480 million, and Rui Sousa with 8.085 million.
The WSOP Paradise had a $15 million guaranteed prize pool and it just barely avoided an overlay. The tournament drew a total of 3,010 entries, generating a $15,050,000 prize pool. The winner will claim the $2 million top prize, with the runner-up getting $1.2 million. The top 15 will all cash for six figures, while the min-cash at the six-handed final table is $400,000.
Everyone returning for Wednesday’s Day 3 is guaranteed at least $32,200.
Despite being a World Series of Poker event, and a Main Event at that, the WSOP Paradise Main Event has an odd structure. There were four Day 1 flights, the first three of which were all the same, with 40-minute blind levels. Tuesday’s Day D, however, was a turbo session, with level durations slashed in half to just 20 minutes.
When 15% of the Day 1D remained, the action was paused for a bit so that the surviving players from Days 1A-1C could take their seats and Day 2 could begin. Yes, Day 2 was played on the same day as Day 1D.
In addition to the four starting flights at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, there were also Day 1 flights on GGPoker. Everyone who made it through one of those got to join the live tournament on Day 2 already in the money.
This was a controversial part of WSOP Paradise, as the online flights were not part of the original plan. As David Lappin wrote about over at VegasSlotsOnline News, the WSOP and GGPoker just kind of sneakily inserted this structure, which GGPoker calls “OnLive.”
But it got worse. Every player who qualified for the live portion of the WSOP Paradise Main Event received a $6,500 prize package that included a hotel stay and lunch each day. That’s not necessarily unusual, but in this case, the fine print said that the prize packages were deducted from the prize pool, thus meaning the $15 million guarantee was not really a $15 million guarantee.
The announced prize pool, though, is the $5,000 buy-in times the 3,010 entries, so it looks like the WSOP and GGPoker may have heard the complaints and not taken anything from the prize pool, after all.
In any case, the field will play down to just six players tonight, who will compete at the WSOP Paradise Main Event final table during Thursday’s Day 4.
2023 WSOP Paradise Main Event – Day 2 Chip Leaders
- Henrique Lessa – 8,640,000
- Adam Walton – 8,480,000
- Rui Sousa – 8,085,000
- Stanislav Zegal – 7,625,000
- Troy Quenneville – 6,365,000
- Ramin Hajiyev – 5,765,000
- Joseph Lebrun – 5,065,000
- Vitor Dzivielevski – 4,360,000
- Jacopo Achille – 4,060,000
- Frank Lagodich – 3,670,000
