The latest news event wise is the WPT Alpha 8, which is an exclusive high stakes tournament series, taking place in Europe, Africa, Asia and America. The WPT regional was is tournaments mainly aimed at smaller casinos with hobby players, doing small buy-ins and large fields in opposition to the regular events which are expensive, have smaller fields and consist mainly of professionals. To cover as many different countries as possible, PartyGaming created WPT regional events together with their regular WPT events. When PartyGaming took over, they quickly decided to expand the tournament series to the whole world, with the brand being so famous it would be easy for them to advertise the tours. Another reason was that Europe already had its own poker tour, the European Poker Tour (EPT), which travelled across all of Europe and had a more European feel.

If they would have to travel to Europe on a regular basis, the cost of production would become much higher than they wanted and the events in the US were more than enough popular to cover the demand from the viewers and players. The WPT made a clear decision to primarily stay within the US to optimize the tournaments and to keep the cost as low as possible. The same year WPT decided to give winners of each event a bracelet as a extra token of their winnings, giving former winners a bracelet as well.įrom the beginning of the WPT and until the acquisition from PartyGaming in 2009, the WPT tournaments were primarily hosted in American casinos all over the US. Since players were not playing with real money, it was legal for Americans to sign up and play on the site, giving the site instant success with its famous brand. ClubWPT is a subscription based site, where players play free tournaments and can win prizes for $100,000 each month.

To expand the brand from being live poker only to online, WPT opened ClubWPT in 2008. The recession caused smaller attendances and prize pools overall, but the WPT was still a popular series. The WPT was the second biggest tournament series in the world after World Series of Poker (WSOP) at the time, but the following year’s recession hit everybody including the WPT. In 2007 the WPT and poker in general was at its highest, creating insane prize pools in the regular events and made the biggest win in WPT history at WPT Championship, which gave Carlos Mortensen almost $4 million in first prize.

World poker tour winners