Seven months into the 2026 season, Red Dragon Poker has run 43 online events covering 311 tournaments, with six recurring series reaching 24 editions between them. This is more than a recap — we lay out each series' fixed rhythm, buy-in range and satellite routes so you can build your own schedule for the rest of the year.
H1 by the Numbers: A Tightening Rhythm
The most telling change this half wasn't the size of any single guarantee — it was how often events ran.
Jan 3 → Feb 6 → Mar 5 → Apr 3 → May 6 → Jun 9 → Jul 11
Six series across 24 editions — 56% of all events, meaning more than half the calendar is predictable.
Of 311 tournaments, 90 were satellites or qualifiers — close to three in ten.
Together these numbers show Red Dragon's calendar shifting from one-off promotions to a predictable, fixed rhythm. For players that matters more than any single guarantee, because you can plan around it instead of waiting for announcements.
Six Series, Six Rhythms
The weekly fixtures
- Red Dragon Weekly: all four H1 editions started on a Saturday, ran two days, with a 518 Main Event and an 800K Dragon total guarantee.
- Red Dragon Midweek: all four editions started on a Tuesday, ran two days, with a 388 Main Event and a 500K Dragon total guarantee.
The monthly and seasonal headliners
- Peak Monthly: once a month, starting Saturday, 888 Main Event, 1.5M Dragon total guarantee.
- Summer Championship Series: three editions (S1, S2, S3), each a 7–8 day festival with an 888 Main Event; S1 and S3 each carried a 10M Dragon total guarantee.
Both ends of the spectrum
- Rising Star Series: buy-ins from 22 to 68.8 Dragon with a 150K guarantee — the lowest entry point of any recurring series, and the natural first stop for newcomers.
- Red Dragon Cup PLUS Online Celebration Festival: the longest edition spanned 13 days with buy-ins from 1 to 1,600 Dragon and a 15M Dragon total guarantee in July.
Three Budgets, Three Approaches
1. The value route (under 120)
Of 295 recorded buy-ins in H1, 123 sat below 120 Dragon — 42% of the field. Start with the Rising Star Series at 22／33／55, learn the format, then use the Weekly's 13／55／70／98 satellites to win your way into the 518 Main.
2. The rhythm route (300–600)
388 Midweek on Tuesday plus 518 Weekly on Saturday — two events a week, two days each, and the most consistent combination of the half. Neither series moved its start day across four editions, which makes it ideal as a long-term training rhythm.
3. The high-stakes route (888 and up)
Peak Monthly at 888 and the Summer Championship Main at 888. Lower frequency, higher guarantees — for players with steady results looking to build a signature run.
The Most Underrated Route: Satellites
90 of the 311 tournaments were satellites or qualifiers. Take the July 25 Weekly edition — there were three separate paths into the 518 Main:
- Super Satellite — 15 seats guaranteed
- Turbo Satellite — 2 seats guaranteed
- Hourly Satellite — 5 seats guaranteed
Turning a 55 Dragon satellite into a 518 Main Event seat means sitting at the same table for less than a tenth of the cost. It was the highest-value and most overlooked route of the half.
Live Alongside: RDPT PLUS Jeju
From July 8 to 19, Red Dragon staged RDPT PLUS in Jeju, South Korea — 12 days and 92 tournaments. The Red Dragon Plus Championship Main Event carried a 4,000,000 KRW buy-in and a 1.8 billion KRW guarantee.
The Red Dragon Cup PLUS Online Celebration Festival ran in sync online — the most complete expression yet of Red Dragon's online-meets-live concept, letting players who couldn't fly to Jeju join the same festival from home.
Third-Party Data: What Actually Happened
Now that the festival has wrapped, the reported results are more telling than any pre-event guarantee — because they reflect what was actually played.
Vietnam's Khanh Duy Ta won it, topping a field of 597 entries. The final prize pool reached 2.063 billion KRW (about USD 1.39 million), comfortably clearing the 1.8 billion KRW guarantee. He took 349.7 million KRW (about USD 232,595) plus a gold dragon bracelet; runner-up Haidi Feng of China earned 298.2 million KRW.
92 tournaments, 4,448 entries, and a combined prize pool of roughly USD 5.8 million.
The numbers only mean something on a timeline
- 2024: 3 events, roughly USD 2.9 million in total prize pools
- Full-year 2025: 154 events and flights, 6,919 entries, around USD 9 million
- Spring 2026 (Apr 10–21): 73 events, 6,410 entries, around USD 9 million
- Summer 2026 (Jul 8–19): 92 events, 4,448 entries, around USD 5.8 million
Put differently: the two live festivals in the first half of 2026 alone generated 1.6 times the prize pool of all of 2025. That is also why the online calendar tightened from three events in January to eleven in July — online and live are riding the same growth curve, not two separate ones.
Worth noting: the Red Dragon name began as the Main Event of the Macau Poker Cup, where it once held the record for Asia's largest freezeout, and only became a standalone tour brand in 2024. In the two years since, annual prize pool volume has grown roughly fivefold.
The takeaway: block out two slots
The Summer Championship S3 closes on August 7, drawing a line under the first half. The second half will still be built around the same six series, and the Tuesday and Saturday fixtures aren't going anywhere — block those two slots in your calendar first, then fit the festivals around them. That's the least effort for the most coverage.
Figures in this article are drawn from Red Dragon Poker's official event data, covering January 1 to July 31, 2026, and including the Summer Championship S3 which closes on August 7. See what's running now →
Sources
Online event counts, schedules and buy-in figures are drawn from Red Dragon Poker's official event data (January 1 – July 31, 2026). Live results, festival scale and historical figures are cited from SomuchPoker and Spade Poker (reported July 19, 2026). Live tournament counts follow the media's event tally, which uses a different basis from the flight-level rows in the official schedule.