Published 17 September 2026. Analysis and views here are our opinion,
not a guarantee of anything. 18+, please gamble responsibly.
19 September 2026 – 28 September 2026 · Dusk Till Dawn, Nottingham · UK time
The UK Poker Championships Masters runs from Saturday 19 to Monday 28 September at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham, Europe’s largest dedicated poker venue, and the number that carries the festival is the gap between the buy-in and the guarantee. £560 gets you into a Main Event guaranteeing £500,000, run under GGPoker’s UKPC banner, which is the kind of ratio that only shows up a handful of times a year on the UK live circuit.
That gap is the whole appeal. Plenty of festivals guarantee seven figures, but they ask for £1,000 or more to get in the door. UKPC Masters sits at a price point most regular players can actually afford to enter more than once, without the field thinning out into a small group of specialists the way it does at the top end of the buy-in ladder.
The Main Event starts Day 1 players with 100,000 in chips, a deepstack structure that Dusk Till Dawn has built its reputation on. The practical effect is that nobody is forced into shove-or-fold poker in the first few levels just because the blinds have caught up with a short stack. Deep starting stacks reward patience and post-flop skill over the first day, rather than turning early levels into a coinflip contest, which is the detail that separates a genuine deepstack event from a festival that only calls itself one.
Dusk Till Dawn runs its Main Events across multiple starting flights rather than a single Day 1, a structure the venue has used consistently on its bigger guarantees, including the January UKPC Main Event earlier this year. Spreading the field across several starting days lets more players enter around work and travel, and it means the field builds gradually rather than in one enormous single sitting.
The venue behind the number
Dusk Till Dawn’s scale is part of why UKPC events land the guarantees they do. The Nottingham venue is the biggest dedicated poker room in Europe, and it has hosted UKPC festivals at multiple points across 2026, including a January edition that also carried a £500,000 Main Event guarantee and ran six starting flights, five in the room and one online through the GGPoker client. The September Masters edition follows the same house style: a mid-stakes flagship event with the infrastructure of a much bigger festival behind it.
What it means if you are deciding whether to play
A £560 Main Event with a £500,000 guarantee needs roughly 900 entries to break even for the operator, and multi-flight structures exist precisely to get a field that size through the door without a single Day 1 room reaching capacity. If the guarantee is met comfortably, as DTD’s mid-stakes majors typically are, the overlay risk that makes some guaranteed tournaments attractive on paper does not really apply here. This is a field-size play rather than a value play: you are buying into a deep structure and a big prize pool split among a large number of entrants, not a soft guarantee.
Elsewhere on the UK circuit
The same week carries UKPL Manchester at Grosvenor Bury New Road (through 20 September, £560 buy-in, £100,000 guaranteed) and the Grosvenor G300 at London’s Victoria Casino (also through 20 September, £300 buy-in, £100,000 guaranteed). GUKPT then moves to Leeds from 24 September to 4 October, with a £1,250 buy-in Main Event guaranteeing £250,000 at Grosvenor Casino Leeds Westgate. Late September is a genuinely busy month for UK live poker, and UKPC Masters is the one that sits at the most accessible buy-in of the four.
The poker offer worth having
We hold one poker welcome offer, from William Hill, and it is worth reading closely rather than skimming past the headline number.
Ad: new William Hill Poker customers who opt in can claim a £100 bonus plus a pack of Twister tournament tickets on a first deposit or transfer of £10 or more.
The £100 is not cash in your account on day one. It is released through WHPoints earned at real-money tables, split across two redemption stages, and it expires after 45 days, which our own scoring treats as a 10x wagering-effort proxy. Someone entering a £560 live Main Event and grinding a reasonable volume of online tables around it over the following six weeks has a realistic shot at clearing a meaningful share of it. Someone depositing purely to chase the £100 number, without the volume to back it up, should expect to unlock part of the bonus rather than all of it. The six-ticket Twister Discovery Pack lands up front regardless, each worth roughly £1, and there are bonus spins attached too, at 40x wagering with a £20 maximum redemption and a 14-day expiry.
The honest read: this offer suits a player who was already going to put in online volume during a month with a live festival to build a schedule around. It does not suit anyone chasing the headline figure without the table time to earn it.
Everything above is opinion and information rather than advice, and a wagering-based bonus is a reason to track your playthrough carefully, not a reason to play more than you would otherwise. 18+, new customers only, please gamble responsibly.
Sources: PokerNews, PokerNews January UKPC, PokerGods UK live poker autumn/winter 2026, Dusk Till Dawn.
