After Day 1b, the 2022 Wynn Millions $10,000 Main Event looked like it was cutting things fine. With two of three flights over, the field was barely halfway to the guarantee.
Day 1c was anticipated to be much larger than the first two flights, but no one at the Wynn could have been completely comfortable until late in the day when the total number of buy-ins finally hit the magic number of 1,000. The final body count was 1,074.
In 2021, the Wynn took a gamble on the post-COVID live poker snap-back and laid on one of the year's biggest live tournaments. They Wynn guaranteed a $10 million prize pool, something few operators outside of the WSOP could have hoped to hit with a $10k buy in event.
It was a huge success. The 2021 Wynn Millions $10,000 Main Event felt like a throwback to the poker boom. The event's 1,328 entries amply covered the $10 million guarantee and Andrew Moreno took home $1.46 million for his first place finish.
This year's stats are similarly impressive, and are only slightly undercut by comparisons to last's year's enormous success.
$10 million dollar baby
Day 1a saw 199 entries thrown into the prize pool. The $10k events at the PokerGO cup last month each attracted around 80 players. Already, the Wynn was doing well.
Day 1b added another 332 entries to the pool, bringing the total number of buy-ins to 531 and the prize pool to $4,991,400 after rake.
That put a lot of pressure on Day 1c, the last of the flights. In order to break even on just the prize pool, the event needed 1,000 total entries. The Wynn would then have to exceed that by another 64 entries if the casino wanted to pocket the whole of the rake.
It came down to the wire in the end with Day 1c drawing a total of 543 entries. Fortunately, that meant the Wynn had hit its target. The huge corporate entity was safely in the black with the prizepool hitting $10,095,600.
Going into Days 2ab and 2c are big name players including: Johan Guilbert, Chad Eveslage, Sam Soverel, Vanessa Kade, Daniel Lazrus, Cherish Andrews, Katie Lindsay, Maria Ho, and Andrew Moreno, the defending champ.
The fields from Days 1a and 1b will combine for day 2ab. Survivors of Day 1c will play out Day 2c by themselves. Then the whole field will combine on Day 3 and play down to a winner by the end of Day 6 (March 11, 2022).
We'll have coverage of the event here.
Featured image source: Twitter
