The LA Poker Classic is heading back to the World Poker Tour Main Tour in 2027, six years after one of poker’s longest-running partnerships was interrupted by the pandemic.
The $10,000 freezeout Championship will run from February 26 to March 3 at Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. It forms part of a much longer LAPC festival scheduled for January 15 to March 7, giving one of American poker’s most recognisable tournaments a chance to recover after a dramatic fall in Main Event numbers.
That recovery is badly needed. The 2026 LA Poker Classic Championship attracted only 50 entries without WPT branding, compared with fields close to 500 during the tournament’s final pre-pandemic years on the tour.
WPT and the LA Poker Classic Reunite for Season 25
The reunion will form part of the WPT’s 25th season. Commerce Casino and the tour were linked from the earliest years of televised poker, with the LAPC appearing on the WPT schedule for each of its first 18 seasons.
WPT CEO Adam Pliska described the LAPC as an important part of the tour’s history when announcing the return. That is difficult to argue with when the winners list includes Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Michael Mizrachi, Antonio Esfandiari and other names closely associated with poker’s television boom.
The tournament is also unusual in the modern live-poker calendar because it remains a freezeout. Players get one $10,000 shot rather than being able to fire multiple entries, a format that gives the final field size a much cleaner comparison with the LAPC’s historic numbers.
From 546 Entries to Just 50
The scale of the decline since the WPT era ended is stark. In 2019, David “ODB” Baker defeated a 546-entry field and won $1,015,000. The delayed 2020 event drew 490 entries before its six-handed final table was eventually completed in 2021, with Balakrishna Patur taking the title and $1,015,000.
After that, the numbers dropped sharply. The Main Event attracted 69 entries in 2021, 119 in 2022, 181 in 2023, 139 in 2024 and 145 in 2025. This year’s field then collapsed to only 50, with Alex Massman collecting $158,030 for first place.
For context, that entire 2026 field was smaller than some individual opening flights at major modern festivals. It also left a tournament once known for producing million-dollar champions looking increasingly detached from the event that had been a fixture of televised WPT poker.
Can the WPT Make the LAPC Huge Again?
The WPT badge alone does not guarantee a return to 500-player fields, but it changes the proposition considerably. A Main Tour title, Champions Club membership and the history attached to the tournament give travelling professionals more reasons to put Los Angeles back on the schedule.
Poker Type has already seen how established tours can give familiar stops fresh momentum. Blake Ellinghaus won his first WPT title earlier this month after the bestbet Scramble comfortably cleared its $1 million guarantee, while WPT Australia opened strongly in Sydney during another busy international festival.
Los Angeles offers a different challenge. The city has enormous poker history and a huge local player pool, but the LAPC’s recent numbers show that history by itself is not enough to make players hand over $10,000.
The full festival running for more than seven weeks should help create a proper lead-in rather than leaving the Championship isolated. A complete schedule has not yet been released, so the size and structure of the supporting events will matter when players decide whether to make the trip.
A Tournament That Helped Build the WPT
Gus Hansen won the first WPT-era LA Poker Classic in 2003, during the period when televised hole cards were turning tournament poker into mainstream entertainment. The event subsequently became one of the tour’s dependable annual landmarks, with seven-figure first prizes common during its strongest years.
Its return also comes during an active period for the tour. Poker Type recently covered the cancellation of WPT Tokyo amid regulatory uncertainty in Japan, making the restoration of a historic US stop a useful counterpoint as the tour shapes its next season.
The first real test will not arrive until February. If the field climbs back into the hundreds, WPT and Commerce will have evidence that the LAPC’s decline was reversible. If numbers remain close to the 50 entries seen this year, the problem will clearly run deeper than branding.
Either way, one of the tournaments that helped define the early World Poker Tour is back where many poker players will feel it belongs. The question now is whether the players come back with it.
