WSOP Announces Commerce Circuit Stop and 2024 TOC
When the World Series of Poker revealed its 2024 WSOP summer bracelet event lineup in mid-February, there was a notable omission. The Tournament of Champions was not included. Promises of its reveal in the coming days and weeks turned into a month and a half of a wait, but it finally happened.
And there was a twist. The 2024 WSOP TOC will be in Los Angeles at Commerce Casino, along with a surprise WSOP Circuit stop to close out the 2023/2024 Circuit season. Players are trying to adjust.
History of WSOP Champion Freerolls
The World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions is a finale for the WSOP Circuit season. It is a freeroll, a tournament to honor the players who performed well throughout the WSOP Circuit season.
When the TOC began in 2004, it was a way to highlight WSOP winners. There was no WSOP bracelet for the winner, and it tended to favor well-known poker players through 2006 before skipping a few years. The 2010 TOC became somewhat of a who’s who of the poker world, with a public vote deciding which 27 of the previous 500-plus bracelet winners would participate.
- 2004 WSOP TOC: Annie Duke won for $2M
- 2005 WSOP TOC: Mike Matusow won for $1M
- 2006 WSOP TOC: Mike Sexton won for $1M
- 2010 WSOP TOC: Huck Seed won for $500K
Separate from that, the WSOP Circuit wanted to host an event for its champions and award a bracelet opportunity for ring winners. There were 100 players who qualified by leaderboard points to play in the $1M freeroll in 2011 (for the 2010/2011 Circuit season. It was called the WSOP Circuit National Championship, hosted at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas just before the summer World Series of Poker. That format, which also allowed others who met certain qualifications to buy in to the freeroll for $10K, continued for a few years.
- 2010/2011 WSOPC National Championship: Sam Barnhart won for $300K
- 2011/2012 WSOPC National Championship: Ryan Eriquezzo won for $416,051
- 2012/2013 WSOPC National Championship: Jonathan Hilton won for $355,599
- 2013/2014 WSOPC National Championship: Dominik Nitsche won for $352,800
- 2014/2015 WSOPC National Championship: Loni Harwood won for $341,599
For the end of the 2015/2016 WSOP Circuit season, the finale became the WSOP Global Casino Championship. It featured winners of the US and international WSOPC events and awarded a bracelet.
- 2015/2016 WSOP Global Casino Championship: Said El-Yousfi won for $343,256
- 2016/2017 WSOP Global Casino Championship: Sean Yu won for $296,941
- 2017/2018 WSOP Global Casino Championship: Warren Sheaves won for $282,113
- 2018/2019 WSOP Global Casino Championship: Ryan Eriquezzo won for $279,431
- 2019/2020 WSOP Global Casino Championship: Andrew Kelsall won for $275,632
The pandemic changed everything, with some of the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Circuit season cancelled, as well as the 2020 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. There was no proper way to host or even calculate who would play in a Circuit championship in 2020 or even in 2021.
When most of poker returned to pre-pandemic normals, it was time to bring the Circuit finale back in 2022. It was a chance to honor winners from the past few WSOP Circuit seasons and all bracelet winners at the same time and pull it all together in Las Vegas. They renamed it the WSOP Tournament of Champions, put a bracelet on the table, and tossed $1M into the prize pool. That worked out well enough to do it again in 2023.
- 2022 WSOP Tournament of Champions: Benjamin Kaupp won it for $250K
- 2023 WSOP Tournament of Champions: Ronnie Day won it for $200K
Big Change for 2024
The long-awaited 2024 TOC information emerged on March 28. The World Series of Poker put it into a multi-tiered announcement.
First, the WSOP declared that the last Circuit stop of the 2023/2024 season, just before the start of the summer WSOP, would be at a new location. The schedule had shown that the last month of this season would start with Harrah’s Cherokee and then spend a few weeks at Caesars Southern Indiana. Now, the tour will continue on to its finale at Commerce Casino in Los Angeles.
The WSOP Circuit Los Angeles will be at Commerce Casino May 10-24, complete with 18 WSOPC ring events, including a $1,700 Main Event with a $1M guarantee. The full series will guarantee $1.75M.
WSOP Executive Director and Senior VP Ty Stewart noted, “For years, Commerce has been the home of poker in Los Angeles and one of the leading card rooms in the world. We look forward to kicking off our new strategic relationship with a special WSOP Circuit finale and the Tournament of Champions bracelet event.”
That 18-event series will lead right into the 2024 TOC.
In addition, the last two days of the series stop will offer last-chance satellites, wherein players can try to win $11K prize packages for the 2024 WSOP Main Event in Las Vegas weeks later.
Who Plays the TOC?
There are multiple ways to qualify to play in the Tournament of Champions. Bracelet winners from the previous year and Circuit ring winners qualify to play. This includes live and online events from anywhere in the world. It creates a large pool of players with invitations, larger than ever, considering there were more than 200 WSOP gold bracelets awarded in 2023 alone.
The past two years shows the massive growth of qualifiers for this freeroll:
- 2022 WSOP TOC: 470 entries from 570 qualifiers
- 2023 WSOP TOC: 741 entries from 960 qualifiers
As of the end of March 2024, the official list of qualifiers already showed 671 entries, but the WSOP will add many more prior to the start of the actual Tournament of Champions at the end of May.
Many players are none too happy about the move of the TOC to Los Angeles. With the extra wait time for information about this year’s TOC, many qualifiers assumed it would be in Las Vegas, as it had been for the past two years. It was impossible to guess the date, though, as the 2022 TOC was at the end of the summer series and the 2023 TOC was at the beginning, but no one guessed that a new location would be in play.
With that said, it is a $1M freeroll, and players will make the trip if they want to take a shot at winning a WSOP bracelet and a piece of that prize pool.
