Who Will Become the 2025 PokerNews Deepstack Championship Champion?
Welcome back to PokerNews, the official media partner of the 2025 World Series of Poker and your home for wall-to-wall coverage of every bracelet event at the WSOP.
We try not to play favorites around here, but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t just a little more hyped than usual today as it's time for Event #78: $600 PokerNews Deepstack Championship (PNDC) No-Limit Hold'em here at Horseshoe and Paris, Las Vegas.
Cards are in the air at 10 a.m. local time for this four-day event. Players start with 30,000 chips and 40-minute levels on Day 1, with late registration open through the first nine levels (closing ≈ 5:00 p.m.). Busted players are allowed one reentry before the close of registration.
There will be a 20-minute break every three levels, plus a 75-minute dinner break after Level 12 (around 7 p.m.). Seventeen levels are on the Day 1 schedule. Those still in the hunt will return at 11 a.m. Wednesday for Day 2, and play another 10 levels, this time with 60-minute levels and even deeper play.
Day 3 will cut the field to the final five, and on Day 4, a champion will be crowned. From Day 2 onward, breaks come every two levels, with 60-minute dinner breaks after Levels 23 and 33.
Scotland’s Hector Berry is the reigning champion, having claimed victory in the inaugural $600 PokerNews Deepstack Championship in 2024. Berry outlasted a massive 5,110-player field to earn $282,876, his first WSOP bracelet, and a custom 24-karat gold PokerNews coin.
"I think you could see at the end I was a little emotional seeing all the messages coming in," Berry told PokerNews after his win last year. "Heads-up, I was just so engrossed in the moment, it's so draining...I don't know where I go from here. It's a lot of money for anyone."
PNDC / $600 Deepstack No-Limit Hold'em Championship Winners
| Year | Entries | Winner | Country | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 5,110 | Hector Berry | United Kingdom | $282,876 |
| 2023 | 4,303 | David Guay | Canada | $271,032 |
| 2022 | 4,913 | Tamas Lendvai | Hungary | $299,464 |
| 2021 | 3,923 | Cole Ferraro | United States | $252.419 |
| 2020 | 2,911 | Dmytro Bystrovzorov | Ukraine | $227,906 |
| 2019 | 6,140 | Joe Foresman | United States | $397,903 |
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MyStack is a free poker tool that allows you to control your chip counts on our live reporting pages. Once you have created a free PokerNews account, you can use MyStack to update your chip counts in real time; hopefully, your stack will continue increasing throughout the event!
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