Mayukh Chakraborty walked into the WSOP Super Circuit Canada Main Event with $3,260 in total recorded live tournament earnings across two career cashes. He walked out of Playground Poker Club in Kahnawake, Quebec on Thursday with CA$1,500,000, a WSOP Circuit gold ring, and his name attached to the largest Main Event in Canadian poker history.
The CA$5,000 buy-in event drew 2,844 entries and built a CA$13,082,400 prize pool — more than triple the previous Canadian Main Event record.
The Numbers That Rewrote the Record Book
The inaugural WSOP Super Circuit Canada was the largest and most significant poker festival ever staged in the country, and the Main Event did the heavy lifting. It cleared its CA$10 million guarantee by more than CA$3 million and paid 428 players.
The previous Canadian Main Event record was CA$4,450,500, set at the same venue in August 2025. This one tripled it. The total series prize pool exceeded CA$18,862,400, surpassing the previous Canadian record for a single series of CA$15,540,000.
For context on how quickly this market has moved: Chakraborty's winner's prize alone is larger than most Canadian Main Event prize pools were before this week. Our Canada poker site rankings cover the online infrastructure that has fed this growth, and it is no coincidence that the two records were set at the same venue twelve months apart.
From $3,260 to CA$1.5 Million
Chakraborty is from North York, Ontario. According to The Hendon Mob, his only previous recorded cashes were a 30th-place finish in the World Cup of Cards CA$1,150 Main Event in January 2025 for $2,254, and a 19th-place finish in a $400 WSOP Circuit event in Verona, New York in March 2026 for $1,006.
That is the entire résumé before Thursday. It is the kind of result that, more than any high-roller title, explains why large-field tournaments retain their pull: the structure genuinely does not care who you are.
Final Table Results
CA$5,000 buy-in | 2,844 entries | CA$13,082,400 prize pool | 428 paid
| Place | Player | Country | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Mayukh Chakraborty | Canada | CA$1,500,000 |
| 2nd | Benjamin Veenstra | Canada | CA$1,000,000 |
| 3rd | Jack Salter | United Kingdom | CA$750,000 |
| 4th | Chance Kornuth | United States | CA$600,000 |
| 5th | Jonathan Bussières | Canada | CA$500,000 |
| 6th | Felipe Baraky | Brazil | CA$400,000 |
| 7th | Parth Mansukh | Canada | CA$300,000 |
| 8th | Deven Lane | Canada | CA$200,000 |
| 9th | Robert Renaud | Canada | CA$150,000 |
Seven of the nine final-table seats went to Canadians.
How It Played Out
Paul Klann entered Day 5 as chip leader with 11.3 million after building the largest stack in a heavily Canadian field. Chance Kornuth sat sixth and Jack Salter ninth — the two most decorated resumes at the table and, on paper, the players to beat.
Thirty survivors played down to a winner on September 10. Kornuth, widely considered the pre-final-table favourite, went out in fourth for CA$600,000. Salter fell in third for CA$750,000, leaving an all-Canadian heads-up match between Chakraborty and Benjamin Veenstra — two players neither of whom had come close to a result of this size.
Veenstra held a slight edge when his tournament-survival moment arrived, but Chakraborty won the flip to take the title. Veenstra banked CA$1,000,000 as runner-up.
Canada's most famous player was involved too. Daniel Negreanu called the traditional "Shuffle Up and Deal" to open the Main Event before entering it himself, running deep into Day 4 before hitting the rail. WSOP Main Event champion Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi, two-time bracelet winner Mike Leah, former WSOP Main Event finalist Griffin Benger and cash-game creator Rayan "beriuzy" Chamas all advanced deep into the field.
The Payout Controversy
The result came with a genuine piece of tournament-administration drama. According to SpadePoker, citing WSOP Live and posts on X, roughly an hour into Day 3 — after the field was already in the money — organisers discovered that an older payout model had been loaded into the system. That model allocated CA$2,000,000 to the winner and reserved 47% of the prize pool for the final table.
WSOP representatives intervened and redistributed the structure mid-tournament, cutting first place from CA$2,000,000 to CA$1,500,000 and reducing the final-table share from 47% to 42.5%, with the savings pushed down to lower finishes. SpadePoker reported player discontent following the change.
The objection is legitimate and worth understanding rather than dismissing. Payout structures are not cosmetic. Once players are in the money, every decision — when to gamble, when to ladder, whether to accept a marginal edge — is priced off the pay jumps in front of them. Altering the curve after the bubble bursts changes the game players thought they had entered. Anyone who has studied ICM knows that a flatter structure meaningfully changes correct short-stack strategy at a final table.
The counterargument is that the alternative — running a Main Event on a structure the organiser did not intend and had not published — is worse, and that the correction moved money toward the many rather than the few. Both things can be true. Chakraborty's prize was CA$500,000 smaller than the original file promised.
What This Means for Players
Canada's live scene is now genuinely major. Playground has set the Canadian record twice in thirteen months, and a CA$13 million Main Event prize pool puts it firmly in the conversation with established European and US festivals. For Canadian players who have historically travelled to Las Vegas for a shot at a life-changing score, that calculus has changed. Our Canada rankings cover the online rooms that feed these fields through satellites.
Satellites remain the best value in poker. A CA$5,000 buy-in is out of reach for most recreational players outright, but qualifying online for a fraction of that is not. Understanding bankroll management is the difference between taking sensible shots and spewing a roll chasing them.
Read the payout structure before you register. The Canada controversy is unusual, but the underlying lesson is routine: knowing the pay jumps before you sit down is basic preparation, not advanced study. It informs how you play the bubble and how you play a final table, and it is information sitting in plain sight that most players never look at.
The WSOP Super Circuit Canada ran at Playground through September 12, with remaining events including the CA$14,000 GGMillion$ High Roller, a PLO Bounty and a closing Turbo Bounty. For more on the season, see our WSOP schedule and tournaments hub.