The 2022 World Series of Poker kicked off in May with players having access to a ton of tournament action at Bally’s and Paris Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now that July has arrived, players are now competing in the heavily anticipated Main Event. The WSOP has announced the total number of entrants for the event this year, with 8,663 players competing.

This number officially sets this Main Event as the second largest in the history of the series. The total is only slightly larger than 2019’s turnout of 8,569 players. The winner of this year’s event will be crowned on July 17, with first-place taking home a whopping $10 million. The second-place prize for the series is $6 million.

Competing in this Year’s WSOP Main Event

This year’s Main Event offered several Day 1s and registration was open until Level 8 began on Day 2d. Late last week, hundreds of players decided to get in line for late registration and it was so many on-site that it would take almost two hours just for the players to get in on the action.

Players were unhappy about the wait times, but no seats were available. Players would have to wait until another player was eliminated before a seat would open up on the WSOP game floor. Once sat at the table, players began with 60,000 chips. Once players got seated at Day 2, blinds were at the 400-800 mark. This gave players a nice stack of big blinds.

However, by the time those at the end of the line got to the table, the number of big blinds per chip stack decreased significantly.

Chip Leaders of the Tournament

At the time of writing, over 380 players remain in the event. Several poker players have solid chip stacks, with the top of the pack sticking close together. Dan Colpoys has the lead at this time with 4.8 million in chips. Not far behind is Johan Schumacher with 4.6 million.

Taylor von Kriegenbergh, Aaron Mermelstein, Victor Li, and Rafael Motoa all have over 4 million chips as well, so the lead could change back and forth quite a bit, especially if the higher chip count players bust others out of the competition.

Each player is hoping to hold on a bit longer and of course, make it to the final table. It will certainly be fun to watch and see who can make it to the end and claim the first-place prize of $10 million-plus the coveted title and gold bracelet!