World Poker Tour Leaning Into Sweepstakes Side Of Online Poker With New ClubWPT Gold

The original big-time social poker site is getting ready to enter the modern-day sweepstakes arena.

The World Poker Tour, which launched Club WPT — a social poker site with a prize component — way back in 2008, is updating its approach and following the trend toward social gaming sites that allow something closer to real-money play by complying with sweepstakes law. This week, WPT announced the forthcoming ClubWPT Gold, which the operator describes as “a new online poker product operating on a sweepstakes-based platform, similar to ClubWPT, legally serving most of the U.S.”

Play on the site is expected to begin in early 2025.

Only eight U.S. states allow regulated online poker and/or online casino play, a limitation that has helped fuel the recent rise of social sites using the sweepstakes model. In order to comply with the law, these sites allow customers to play for free, but also offer an option to deposit real money and withdraw real money. The sites typically have two forms of currency: “gold coins,” which have no monetary value, and “sweeps coins,” which can be redeemed for cash or prizes.

This is precisely how ClubWPT Gold will operate, according to the press release.

Starting off with a bang

Before the new poker site launches for play, it will make its promotional presence felt as the title sponsor of The ClubWPT Gold $5M Invitational Freeroll, a live tournament running at Wynn Las Vegas Dec. 13-15 as part of the annual WPT World Championship series.

The opportunity to win a seat in that $5 million freeroll is currently open, via the site ClubWPTGold.com. The site spells out clearly, “No purchase necessary.”

ClubWPT Gold will give away 2,000 “Golden Passports” between now and Dec. 13, awarding winners a seat in the freeroll (and, though this is not spelled out anywhere, presumably covering travel and hotel as well). A “variety of online promotions, contests, and giveaways for ClubWPT Gold members” will determine who wins the Golden Passports.

Full prize details for the freeroll are not yet known, but first place is guaranteed $1 million, and 100 players will win a seat worth $10,400 in the WPT World Championship tournament. As the freeroll has a $5 million total guarantee, that leaves another $2.96 million in the prize pool for other contestants.

“Our return to Wynn Las Vegas this December is equipped with another monumental investment into the development and growth of not only the WPT World Championship, but the poker industry as a whole,” WPT President and CEO Adam Pliska said in the release. “In celebration of the launch of ClubWPT Gold, we’re aiming for another first for the poker world with the largest freeroll ever offered.”

WPT was way ahead of the sweepstakes curve

The original Club WPT site remains active, with a monthly fee required to access poker tournaments, sit & gos, and ring games.

As one of the people who first conceived Club WPT some 16 years ago, Brett Calapp, recently told Casino Reports, “The fundamental concept of Club WPT was that we wanted to create a safe environment that had caps on risk. It was a business model that took into account that this sort of poker was not for everybody, but could find its place in the poker ecosystem. And it needed to have what I would call the ‘prize effect.’ There needed to be a range of prizes that people would want to play for, because you had to have a prize component to make the games competitive.”

The site was designed to align with sweepstakes law, but it didn’t use the dual currencies that have recently become a staple of the social-with-sweepstakes model.