calendar
The poker calendar.
A poker year is not a random scatter of tournaments. It is a small number of series that come back at roughly the same time every year, built in roughly the same way, with a great deal of smaller poker filling the gaps between them. Learn the shape once and you can read any schedule that gets published, in any year.
written August 2026, sources checked 30 August 2026
in this section
Every summer
WSOP schedule
How is the World Series of Poker put together?
What recurs every year: the length of the series, the range of buy-ins, the Main Event, and the four other WSOP families that run outside the summer. Plus where the schedule for the current year lives.
Since 1970
WSOP history
Why does the Main Event cost ten thousand dollars?
Seven invited players, a champion decided by a vote, and a buy-in that has not moved since 1972. The rules of the series have barely changed; the size of the field changed everything else.
Records
Players
What does a big career total actually prove?
How to read a hall of fame and a money list without drawing the wrong conclusion from them. Both measure something real, and neither measures what most people think.
The format
Tournament play
What is different about a multi table tournament?
The format every one of these series is built on. Hundreds of entries, one prize pool, and a stack measured in big blinds that only drifts down.
why you will not find dates here
A schedule you copy is wrong by next year.
Almost every poker calendar page on the internet is a list of dates that someone typed out once. It was correct for a season. Then a festival moved city, a series shifted from autumn to spring, an event was added or dropped, and nobody went back to the page. The page kept ranking, so people kept reading it, and the only thing that changed was how wrong it was.
So this section is built the other way round. What you get here is how these events work and what recurs, because that part is genuinely stable: the Main Event buy-in has not changed since 1972, as the history page sets out. For the dates themselves, go to the organiser. They have a reason to keep their own schedule correct, and you have no reason to trust anyone who does not.
| When | What recurs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Late spring into summer | The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas | The longest festival of the year, running for roughly seven weeks with a bracelet event starting almost every day and the Main Event near the end of it. |
| Spring and late summer | The European festivals | The European Poker Tour runs a handful of stops per year across European cities. In 2026 that was four festivals, in Paris, Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Prague. |
| November | The Amsterdam series | The Master Classics of Poker has been held at Holland Casino Amsterdam in November since 1992, with one cancelled edition in 2020. |
| December | The year end stop | The WSOP runs a Bahamas festival in December, and the EPT closes its year in Prague. December is the second busiest month after the summer. |
| All year | Circuit and regional events | The WSOP Circuit runs continuously across dozens of venues in several countries, at buy-ins far below the flagship events. Most players who play live play these. |
Patterns, not promises. Months are where these series have sat in recent years; the exact days move every edition and are published by the organiser.
Two other tours turn up in most conversations about the live calendar: the World Poker Tour and the Triton Series. Both publish their stops on their own sites. They are not listed with dates here for the same reason nothing else is, and Pokiq has no affiliate links to any of them, so nothing on this page is a recommendation to enter anything.
If you play online rather than live, the calendar question turns into a different one first, which is where you are allowed to play at all. That depends on the country you sit in, not on the site you visit, and how to check it for your own jurisdiction is a page of its own. What to look for in an operator once you have an answer is on the poker rooms page.
reading a schedule
The buy-in tells you the least.
When a schedule is published, most people scan the price column and stop. The price is the least informative number on the line. Four other numbers decide what you are actually buying: the starting stack, the length of a level, how many day one flights there are, and how long late registration stays open. Together they tell you how many hands you get, and hands are the thing you are paying for.
A starting stack of thirty thousand with forty minute levels is a different game from twenty thousand with twenty minute levels, even at an identical entry fee. The first lets you play poker after the flop. The second turns into a push or fold exercise faster than most people expect, and your position starts mattering more than your cards. If you want to feel the difference before you enter anything, running a blind timer over a home game structure is the cheapest way to do it.
The other half of a schedule is the payout structure, and it changes what a correct decision is. In a tournament that pays a top few places, chips stop being worth what they cost you near the money, which is what ICM describes. It is the single largest difference between reading a cash game hand and reading the same hand in an event on this calendar.
next
Start with the series everything else is measured against.
The World Series of Poker is the longest festival of the year and the one whose schedule people search for by name. Learn how it is put together once, and every other schedule you ever open reads faster.
questions about the calendar
Where can I find the poker tournament calendar for this year?
At the organiser, and nowhere else that you can trust. Each series publishes its own schedule on its own site and updates it when something moves, which happens more often than you would expect. The World Series of Poker publishes at wsop.com, the European Poker Tour at pokerstarslive.com. A calendar copied onto a third party site is a snapshot of the day someone typed it out.
Why is there no list of dates on this page?
Because it would be wrong within a year and would keep being found long after that. Dates move, venues change, and a series can shift from autumn to spring, which the WSOP Europe did. What does not move is how these events are built, so that is what this section explains. For the dates themselves you get sent to the source that has a reason to keep them correct.
When is the poker season?
There is no closed season, but there is a shape to the year. The largest festivals cluster in the northern summer, the European stops spread across spring and late summer, and a second cluster lands around December. Circuit and regional events run more or less continuously underneath all of that.
How far ahead should I plan a live tournament trip?
Far enough to read the structure sheet, which is the part most people skip. Starting stack, level length, the number of day one flights and how long late registration stays open decide how much poker your buy-in actually buys. Two events with the same entry fee can differ by a factor of three in the number of hands you get to play.
Do I need to travel to play tournaments?
No. Online tournaments run every day at every buy-in, and the decisions are the same ones. Whether you may play online for money depends on where you live, which is a question worth answering before you register anywhere.
Does Pokiq run tournaments?
No. Pokiq is a training platform, there is no stake and no payout here, and we do not sell entries or send you to operators. This section exists because knowing how the events are built makes the strategy pages easier to place.