WPT Australia 2026: Sydney Schedule, WPT Prime & Championship Guide

Last Updated on September 3, 2026 by Bala Kumar

The World Poker Tour lands in Sydney next week for the biggest festival it has ever staged in Australia.

WPT Australia 2026 runs September 10–30 at The Star Sydney,  three weeks, 36 tournaments, and for the first time on Australian soil, two championship events inside a single festival. The A$1,500 WPT Prime Australia Championship and the A$5,000 WPT Australia Championship both carry livestreamed final tables and a seat in the WPT Champions Club for the winner.

There are also nine WPT World Championship tickets floating around the schedule, which is the detail most players miss.

Here’s everything you need to plan the trip.

The essentials

Why 2026 is different: the dual-championship format

Until this year, an Australian WPT stop meant one championship. WPT Prime — the tour’s mid-major tier — and the Main Tour ran as separate festivals in separate places.

Sydney 2026 merges them. The Prime Championship anchors the middle week, the Main Tour Championship closes the festival, and players who bust one still have the other in front of them. It’s the first time the dual-championship structure has come to Australia, and it changes the maths on a trip: a player flying in from Melbourne, Auckland or Singapore now has two shots at a WPT title in one visit instead of one.

The recent numbers suggest the demand is there. The 2025 WPT Prime Gold Coast Championship pulled 1,106 entries at an A$1,100 buy-in for a A$1,918,500 prize pool — the third straight year that event cleared four figures in entries. Across both Australian stops in 2025, prize pools totalled more than A$4.9 million.

Full WPT Australia 2026 schedule

These are the headline events from the 36-tournament schedule. Buy-ins and dates can move — confirm on The Star Sydney’s official poker page before booking flights around a specific flight.

The WPT Prime Australia Championship (A$1,500)

September 17–22

Prime is where the volume is. The A$1,500 buy-in sits in the sweet spot for Australian recreational players and travelling semi-pros, and Prime Championships in this region have a habit of drawing four-figure fields.

Multiple starting flights run across the opening days, with survivors combining before the tournament plays down to a livestreamed final table on September 22. The winner joins the WPT Champions Club — the same club a A$5,000 Main Tour champion joins, which is a large part of Prime’s appeal.

Who this event is for: anyone who wants a genuine WPT title without a five-figure commitment, and anyone building a Sydney trip around value rather than prestige.

The WPT Australia Championship (A$5,000)

September 24–30

The main event of the festival, and the one that decides which name goes on the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup.

The four most recent champions give a good sense of what it takes to win:

Field sizes have run between 396 and 710, with first prizes from roughly A$585,000 to A$855,000. On that trend, the 2026 winner is likely looking at a payday in the A$550,000–A$850,000 range,  plus a $10,400 seat into the WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas in December, which every Season 24 Main Tour winner receives.

Satellites: how to get in cheap

The satellite programme is the part of this festival worth studying, because the entry routes are genuinely aggressive.

• A$290 and A$550 direct qualifiers feed the A$5,000 WPT Australia Championship. At A$290, that’s a 1-in-17 shot at a A$5,000 seat if you win outright.
• A$290 “1 in 6” satellites run into the A$1,500 WPT Prime Australia Championship — one seat awarded for every six entries.
• Satellites also run into the Australian Poker Cup, Mystery Bounty, Australian PLO Championship, Mini Championship and other featured events.

Qualifiers run in the lead-up to and throughout the festival, so a player arriving in Sydney with A$1,000 has realistic paths into events they couldn’t otherwise buy into directly.

The nine WPT World Championship seats

Scattered across the schedule are nine tickets to the WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas in December,  the tour’s flagship $10,400 event, which drew 1,865 entries and an $18.2 million prize pool in its 2025 edition.

For an Australian player, that’s the real prize hiding in this festival. A A$290 satellite into a Sydney event that awards a Vegas seat is one of the better value chains in poker right now.

Player of the Festival and Team of the Festival

Both awards return in 2026.

Player of the Festival rewards consistency across the 36 events rather than a single result, useful if you’re playing the full three weeks and want something to chase after a deep run falls short.

Team of the Festival is the more unusual one, and it’s a format WPT Australia has been experimenting with: players group into teams and accumulate results collectively. It gives the festival a social layer that most tournament series lack, and it’s a genuine reason to show up with friends rather than alone.

Planning your trip

Pick your window first, then your events. Three sensible approaches:

Accommodation. The Star is offering discounted rates for festival players, which is worth checking before booking elsewhere — the commute advantage during a deep run is real when Day 2 finishes at 2am.

Watch the calendar overlap. The Irish Poker Open Sydney ran August 31 – September 14 in the same city, and the WSOP Circuit and WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star both open in October. If you’re routing a longer trip, map it before you book.

Who will win in 2026?

The last four champions have nothing in common, which is what makes predicting this hard.

James Obst won in 2024 in the middle of a comeback that had taken him away from poker entirely to chase professional tennis. Richard Lee flew in from the United States in 2023 and never lost the chip lead. Alan Pham broke through to his first million in career earnings in 2025. And David Tang, the 2022 champion, tried to cancel his flight to watch the AFL Grand Final, couldn’t get a refund, went anyway and won A$647,470.

There is no profile. There’s just a field of somewhere between 400 and 700 players and a trophy at the end of it.

FAQs

Bala Kumar

Founder of PokerClubGames.com and a Poker Researcher with 10+ years of experience in SEO, WordPress development, and gaming content strategy. Specializes in researching online poker sites, poker apps, tournaments, bonuses, and poker strategies. Experienced in poker platform reviews, affiliate marketing, and creating SEO-focused poker content for global audiences.

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