Shuffle up and deal! The 48^th annual World Series of Poker has officially started on Wednesday morning at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. There will be 74 events during this season and many seasoned pros, wannabes and internet kids will be going for glory and millions of dollars in prize pools during the summer. Traditionally, the first tournament is the $565 no-limit hold’em Casino Employees event.

Bigger and Better WSOP

The WSOP schedule this year includes eight new events An Interesting fact is that there are three online bracelet events after the successful experiment in 2015. Some other newly added tournaments are the $10 000 Tag Team, a $2 620 Marathon tournament and the $365 buy-in Giant. It’s obvious that WSOP is trying to stay in touch with the modern day poker and be flexible. You can find the full schedule of the events here – http://www.wsop.com/tournaments/

The WSOP hosts hope to improve on the record holding 2016. It was by far the most successful year ever with a whopping 107 833 entrants from 107 different nations. The sum of the price money was also astronomical – $221 211 633.

Changes In 207

A huge change from previous years is that players will be able to use their credit cards to pay for buy-ins up to $10 000. For comparison, the maximum in 2016 was $1 500. We believe it was about that for this to happen, as credit cards have been a preferred payment option for many players.

There are another two other major changes we wrote about recently. One of them is that November Nine is gone and the WSOP Main Event will be done in the summer. Also, the management decided to implement some new rules about the clock. The main idea is to upper the tempo and make the game more enjoyable. Let’s hope it works for the best.

If you’re one of the many people in Vegas, let the poker gods be with you!