Debuting in 2022 as part of the Season XX schedule, WPT Australia represented a significant moment on multiple fronts. It was the first World Poker Tour Main Tour stop to take place outside of the United States in over two-and-a-half years, and locally, it represented a cresting wave as poker’s resurgence in the region hit a new high water mark.
After a few years of dormancy and uncertainty, it appears that a poker community that has some of the deepest roots in the world is officially back.
Major poker events in Australia can be traced all the way back to the late 1990s in Melbourne, with the first-ever Australasian Poker Championships held in 1998. The A$1,000 buy-in main event, which was played in a Limit Hold’em format ala the early Party Poker Millions, awarded a first-place prize of just over $15,000 that year. By 2006, when that festival was officially renamed the Aussie Millions, prizes crossed the $1 million threshold, a revolutionary $100,000 buy-in mark was crossed, and Australia had officially become a poker hotbed.
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Everything exploded in the year after Joe Hachem won the 2005 World Series of Poker Main Event for $7.5 million, shining a bright light on Australian poker players for the world to see. One year later, Hachem added a WPT title when he won the Five Diamond World Poker Classic.
Coupled with the rise of online poker worldwide, and the appeal of Australia as a destination for players around the world, and for a stretch the Aussie Millions became the biggest poker event in the world that didn’t fall within the boundaries of the World Poker Tour, World Series of Poker or European Poker Tour.
It continued this way for the better part of 15 years, as poker in the region thrived and fans around the world got to know names like Tony G, Jeff Lisandro, James Obst, and Michael Addamo, among many others.
Everything continued in a similarly successful fashion until 2020. Shortly after the 2020 Aussie Millions, everything shut down due to COVID and Australia was essentially cut off from the rest of the world. Crown Resorts, the operator of Aussie Millions host Crown Melbourne and several other casinos, found itself mired in legal and financial woes amounting to A$700 million in fines for a variety of violations including skirting anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.
Even as the country’s flagship event disappeared, the appetite for poker in Australia remained. On a regional level, the pub poker scene thrived, with freerolls and buy-ins as low as $20 for weekly events. WPT League, the official poker league partner of the World Poker Tour, held their annual WPT League Championship in Sydney this past June with the A$675 Main Event attracting 784 entries to cap off the 12-event festival schedule.
Another organization, the Australian Poker League operates events on a broad scale of buy-ins and field sizes as well, and has risen to a point where its signature yearly event, the APL Million Gold Coast, has become a can’t-miss tournament event. Hosted at the Southport Sharks events center in Queensland, the most recent APL Million Gold Coast Main Event drew an astounding 3,160 players for its A$1,500 Main Event, with a first-place prize of $464,363.
In the middle of this poker resurgence, especially in the Gold Coast region, has been the World Poker Tour. Starting with WPTDeepstacks in 2019, and followed by WPT Prime in 2021 and Main Tour in 2022, Gold Coast has become one of the signature stops on the WPT calendar.
On Friday, the World Poker Tour kicks off its return to Gold Coast for its third-ever Main Tour stop at The Star Gold Coast. The A$8,000 buy-in will offer one of the richest poker prizes to be won in Australia in 2024, and within a week of action, someone will join David Tang and Richard Lee as champions of WPT Australia – joining a proud lineage of Australian champions that appears likely to grow even stronger in the years to come.