Richard Lee etched his name on the WPT Mike Sexton Champions Cup in 2023 when he won the second edition of WPT Australia. Debuting in 2022 as part of the Season XX schedule, WPT Australia represented a significant moment on multiple fronts. It was the first World Poker Tour Main Tour stop to take place outside of the United States in over two-and-a-half years, and locally, it represented a cresting wave as poker’s resurgence in the region hit a new high water mark.
After a few years of dormancy and uncertainty, it appears that a poker community that has some of the deepest roots in the world is officially back.
Major poker events in Australia can be traced all the way back to the late 1990s in Melbourne, with the first-ever Australasian Poker Championships held in 1998. The A$1,000 buy-in main event, which was played in a Limit Hold’em format ala the early Party Poker Millions, awarded a first-place prize of just over $15,000 that year. By 2006, when that festival was officially renamed the Aussie Millions, prizes crossed the $1 million threshold, a revolutionary $100,000 buy-in mark was crossed, and Australia had officially become a poker hotbed.
Everything exploded in the year after Joe Hachem won the 2005 World Series of Poker Main Event for $7.5 million, shining a bright light on Australian poker players for the world to see. One year later, Hachem added a WPT title when he won the Five Diamond World Poker Classic.
Coupled with the rise of online poker worldwide, and the appeal of Australia as a destination for players around the world, and for a stretch the Aussie Millions became the biggest poker event in the world that didn’t fall within the boundaries of the World Poker Tour, World Series of Poker or European Poker Tour.
It continued this way for the better part of 15 years, as poker in the region thrived and fans around the world got to know names like Tony G , Jeff Lisandro , James Obst , and Michael Addamo , among many others.
Everything continued in a similarly successful fashion until […]
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