WSOP books Punta Cana for January, turning the Dominican Republic's festival cluster into a season

The Dominican Republic has had festival poker for years. What it has not had is a run of it.

Three events now sit inside ten weeks. The CLSOP Festival — Caribbean Latin Series of Poker — opens at Santo Domingo Bay in Boca Chica on Tuesday 24 November 2026 and runs to 2 December: twenty-two sessions, a USD 500 Main Event guaranteeing USD 100,000 over five Day 1 flights, a USD 800 High Roller as the top buy-in, and three freerolls feeding the Main. It is a festival priced for the regional field rather than the flight-in field, and the cheapest route to the Main Event costs nothing but time.

It has barely finished when the Suprema Poker Tour's fourth 2026 stage starts at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana on 2 December, overlapping the CLSOP's last day. That one runs five days and twenty-three sessions to 6 December, with its own USD 500 Main Event 100K — the same buy-in and the same guarantee as the CLSOP's, across six Day 1 flights instead of five, the last of them a hyper at ten in the morning. Its side schedule leans harder on Omaha than most Caribbean stops do: a USD 500 Omaha 5 Mystery Bounty, a USD 500 Omaha K.O. with a USD 50 satellite, and a USD 1,000 Championship High Roller on top.

Two festivals a week apart, at opposite ends of the island, with identical Main Event numbers. That is a market with enough players in it to support both, or an organiser betting that it is.

Then comes the part that changes the shape of the thing. WSOP has announced a Super Circuit LATAM stop at Hard Rock Punta Cana from 24 January to 2 February 2027 — ten days at the venue that has just hosted the Suprema stage. As of 4 November the announcement is dates and venue only. No event list, no Main Event buy-in, no guarantees, no structures. We have recorded it at exactly that level rather than filling in the gaps with what a Super Circuit stop usually costs, because a plausible figure published as a fact is worse than an honest blank.

Why the venue keeps winning the booking

Hard Rock Punta Cana has roughly 45,000 square feet of casino floor, a dedicated poker room that operates outside festival weeks, and a convention centre attached. That last item is the one that decides these things: a festival Main Event with six Day 1 flights needs space a casino floor cannot spare, and very few Caribbean properties have both the room and the airport five minutes away.

What is still not published

A good deal, and it is worth naming. Neither Hard Rock Punta Cana nor Santo Domingo Bay publishes a poker table count, a cash-game stake list, or hours for its poker room. The Suprema schedule gives buy-ins and start times but no starting stacks, level lengths or late-registration cutoffs. The CLSOP listing carries two different Main Event guarantees — USD 110,000 in its page header, USD 100,000 in its own schedule — and we have published the schedule figure while flagging the difference, rather than quoting the larger number and hoping.

For players

Minimum age in the Dominican Republic is 18. A festival trip costs considerably more than its Main Event ticket once flights, rooms, side events and reentries are counted; the arithmetic that matters is the week's total, not the headline buy-in. Poker is a game of skill played for entertainment, and a ten-week run of festivals is a run of opportunities to spend money as much as it is anything else.