WSOP 2026: Renji Mao Among Leaders in $5k NLHE Event
The 2026 World Series of Poker has begun. After the 2025 WSOP Main Event winner Michael Mizrachi grabbed the microphone and declared “Shuffle Up and Deal”, the 57th annual WSOP was underway. A celebration of poker, with 100 WSOP bracelet events, thousands of household names and hundreds of thousands of entries into tournaments which will live forever in poker’s history books.
The opening two events kicked off overnight in Las Vegas and we’ve got the highlights of what happened, with plenty of PokerStake players running very deep.
The Grinder Welcomes the Masses
This year’s 57th annual World Series of Poker (WSOP) was opened by the man who made the 2025 version his own. Michael Mizrachi, also known as ‘Grinder’, won not only the Main Event for $10m but the $50,000-entry Poker Players Championship. Winning both of those events in one year had never been achieved before and Grinder’s fourth PPC victory earned him an instant pass into the Poker Hall of Fame.
Now a GGPoker Global Ambassador, Mizrachi opened this year’s show alongside broadcasting anchor Jeff Platt and WSOP legend and tournament director Jack Effel. Welcoming players to the felt, Grinder then left the stage to raucous applause, the crowd appreciating one year on the magnitude of Micrachi’s victory in Vegsas in 2025.
With 100 bracelet events meaning packed days at the poker felt, this one started with just two events as the series began with a gentle toe in the water compared to some of the shark-infested dee-end dives yet to come. The opening event cost $550 to play and featured 1,635 total entries in the $550 Mystery Millions bounty NLHE event, and the second was a standard NLHE event playing out in 8-max format, which had 415 entries.
Theodore in the Chasing Pack
The $550-entry Mystery Millions event ended the day with just 60 survivors from its gargantuan field of 1,635 total entries. Top of the shop was the Las Vegas local man Jansen Satparam (1.8m), with the German Peyman Luth (1.7m) and American pair David Farber (1.6m) and Steven Buckner Jr (1.5m) also inside the top four places.
Who’ll walk away with the top bounty prize of $1,000,000? That’s anyone’s guess, but with Gabriel Andrade (805,000), Chad Eveslage (690,000), DJ Buckley (620,000), Benjamin Ector (600,000), Jeremy Becker (535,000), PokerStake player Kevin Theodore (260,000) and Daniel Sepiol (215,000) all surviving to Day 2, there are some very big names still involved.
Dzivielevski Leads from PokerStake’s Finest in $5k Event #2
Tables at the Horseshoe Las Vegas and Paris casinos were also full of players in the $5,000-entry 8-Handed No-Limit Hold’em Event #2. With a total of 415 entries, a $1,909,000 prize pool. Only 142 of those players survived to make Day 2, where late registration will last the first two levels tomorrow, so there is no final prize pool or top prize known at this time.
Top of the leaderboard is the Brazilian poker pro Yuri Dzivielevski (715,000), with Peter Cross (525,000) and Bulgaria’s Yuliyan Kolev (470,500) both chasing the leader hard. American pro Benjamin Williams (456,000) and Spanish player Daniel Vicente (401,000) completed the top five, with Ren ‘Tony’ Lin (316,500) ending the night in 10th place.
Others to survive included motormouth Martin Kabrhel (298,000), Chinese poker great and PokerStake player Renji Mao (270,000), the former WPT Player of the Year Matthew Salsberg (258,500), PokerStake’s Chris ‘Big Huni’ Hunichen (249,500), Ukrainian poker hero Eugene Katchalov (189,000), ‘Barstool Nate’ Silver (175,500), another PokerStake legend Stephen Song (127,000), former WSOP Europe Main Event champion Max Neugebauer (98,000), poker author and professional Maria Konnikova (75,000), and the PokerStake crusher Benny Glaser (37,500), albeit with the British player clinging on to hopes of an immediate ninth WSOP bracelet.
Here are the current top 10 players in the first $5,000 buy-in event of the 57th annual WSOP.
| WSOP 2026 Event #2 $5,000 8-Max NLHE Day 1 Top 10 Chipcounts: | |||
| Position | Player | Country | Chips |
| 1st | Yuri Dzivielevski | Brazil | 715,000 |
| 2nd | Peter Cross | United States | 525,000 |
| 3rd | Yuliyan Kolev | Bulgaria | 470,500 |
| 4th | Benjamin Williams | United States | 456,000 |
| 5th | Daniel Vicente | Spain | 401,000 |
| 6th | Clemen Deng | United States | 358,500 |
| 7th | Peter Mugar | United States | 342,000 |
| 8th | David Chaput | United States | 335,500 |
| 9th | Fikret Kovac | Bosnia & Herzegovina | 320,000 |
| 10th | Ren Lin | China | 316,500 |
Headline photo by Eloy Cabascas for the World Series of Poker.