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In December last year, poker players and fans of the World Series of Poker received an early Christmas from the organizer. This pleasant surprise was in the form of an announcement of the key dates of for the 50th Annual World Series of Poker tournament. The festival has been scheduled to take place in the summer from May 28 to July 16 at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino. It also marks a very huge milestone for the WSOP and therefore there are several special events that have been included just to commemorate the historic occasion.

One of the most notable and the first celebratory event for the festival is the ‘Big 50’ which is a new addition that will be offering the players a $500 rake-free shot at a bracelet. It is, however, important to note that while the initial buy-in for the Big 50 is rake-free, the subsequent re-entries, including entries into future starting flights, will be subject to rake. If you are looking for some excitement, the tournament which will be taking place on the opening weekend will come with $5,000,000 guarantee as a well as a prize of over $1,000,000 for the winner. For this reason, the WSOP is anticipating that the Big 50 will be one of the biggest tournaments in the festival’s history.

“We expect our opening weekend Big 50 event to be one of the largest in our history, and certainly one of the best value tournaments ever offered. This is part of our concerted plans to make the 2019 WSOP a better value all-around,” said WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart.

The Big 50 aside, the World Series of Poker Main Event will get underway on July 3 and will run till July 16 with wall-to-wall broadcast coverage on both ESPN and PokerGO. The 50th WSOP Main Event will be somewhat deeper than what we have experienced in the past – the starting stack will be 60,000 but it will remain to be a freeze out with two-hour levels.

Brace Yourself for More

Barely a month after releasing a few select events and dates for the 2019 World Series of Poker, the organizers of the festival have announced 13 more events that will make up the schedule – these include several major no-limit hold’em events that have become customer favorites over the years.

Just to name a few, some of the tournaments that have been finalized are the $500 buy-in casino employees’ event, the $1,000 ladies no-limit hold’em, the $1,000 super seniors, the $2,620 Marathon, the $1,000 double stack, the $1,111 Little One for One Drop, the Colossus and the $1,500 Closer.

The Colossus, which has been a fan-favorite since it debuted in 2015 as a $565 buy-in will probably be the most interesting one this time around as it’s the buy-in has been reduced to $400 following years of declining interest from the players.