Felipe Baraky turned a $150 satellite ticket into the biggest live score of his career, but the Brazilian online grinder fell two spots short of a Canadian-dollar millionaire’s payday at the WSOP Super Circuit Canada Main Event. Baraky finished sixth for C$400,000 in a tournament that shattered every attendance record the World Series of Poker brand has ever posted north of the border, and his run gives Brazil another live poker headline in a September already packed with them.
A Record-Breaking Debut for WSOP Super Circuit in Canada
The 2026 season marked the first time the WSOP Super Circuit banner traveled to Canada, landing at Playground Poker Club just outside Montreal as part of an expanded partnership between the World Series of Poker and the venue. The Main Event carried a C$5,000 buy-in against a guarantee that organizers had already billed as a Canadian record at $10,000,000 CAD before a single card was dealt.
Players blew past that number. A total of 2,844 entries poured in, making it the largest live tournament field the country has ever hosted and forcing Playground Poker Club to run late-night flights just to keep pace with registration. By the time the field had been whittled down to a single unofficial table, the room had produced storylines on nearly every continent, from Canadian grinders making a run in their home country to European pros and Brazilian online qualifiers hunting a life-changing score.
Baraky’s Road From a $150 Satellite to the Final Table
Baraky did not buy directly into the C$5,000 Main Event. Instead, he built his stack the way a growing number of online-first Brazilian players have in 2026: through GGPoker’s WSOP Express satellites, low-cost qualifiers that regularly send winners to marquee live series for a fraction of the sticker price. Baraky turned a $150 Express ticket into his Main Event seat, and he was not alone in doing so. Fellow qualifier Jonathan Bussieres also parlayed a $150 Express win into a deep run, and the two online qualifiers ended up seated at the same nine-handed final table, eventually combining for close to C$900,000 in prize money between them.
Baraky is best known in Brazilian poker circles as an online specialist out of Minas Gerais, where he has built a résumé heavy on major online series results rather than live festival appearances. He has previously final-tabled WCOOP Event #14 on PokerStars for a three-way deal worth $91,553, and he has also come up just short as the runner-up in a PokerStars Bounty Builder Series event worth $51,383. The Playground Poker Club run adds a marquee live result to that mostly-online body of work, and it likely stands as the largest single tournament cash of his career to date.
The Final Table and the Hand That Ended Baraky’s Run
Nine players returned for the unofficial final table, and the composition told its own story about how far the WSOP Super Circuit brand has traveled: six of the nine finishers were Canadian, reflecting the strength of the host country’s grassroots scene, while the remaining three came from Brazil, England and the United States.
Play eventually folded down to the final six, where Baraky was eliminated in sixth place for C$400,000 after running into a stronger holding. One spot ahead of him, Bussieres banked C$500,000 for fifth. American poker pro Chance Kornuth, an Americas Cardroom-sponsored player with a long track record on the high-roller circuit, fell in fourth for C$600,000. England’s Jack Salter, a well-traveled European Poker Tour regular, took third for C$540,000, while Canada’s own Benjamin Veenstra finished runner-up.
The eventual champion was Mayukh Chakraborty, a Canadian cybersecurity professional who came into the week with barely $3,260 in recorded live tournament earnings across two prior cashes. Chakraborty defeated Veenstra heads-up to claim the title, taking home a top prize that organizers had trimmed earlier in the tournament. Facing an unexpectedly deep and lucrative field, WSOP officials adjusted the payout structure on Day 3, cutting the announced first-place prize from C$2,000,000 to C$1,500,000 while flattening payouts further down the table, a move that padded results like Baraky’s sixth-place cash relative to the tournament’s original structure.
What Baraky’s Run Means for Brazil’s Live Poker Wave
Brazilian players have been among the most visible nationalities on the 2026 live tournament calendar, with results stacking up across the WSOP, WSOP Online, EPT Barcelona and BSOP stops throughout the year. Baraky’s deep run in Montreal fits that pattern and reinforces a broader trend worth watching: online qualifiers using cheap satellite paths, rather than direct buy-ins, to access marquee live series that would otherwise be out of reach financially. GGPoker’s WSOP Express promotion, which sent both Baraky and Bussieres to Montreal for a $150 outlay each, has become one of the more efficient on-ramps for that style of player.
For newer players following Baraky’s path and hoping to build a similar satellite-to-final-table run of their own, understanding tournament structures and how payouts are built is a useful starting point. Poker Pro Academy’s WSOP guide breaks down how Series events like this one are structured, from satellite qualification to final-table pay jumps, for players plotting their own route into a marquee live series.
With the WSOP Super Circuit Canada now in the books as a resounding success, expect Playground Poker Club to lock in an even bigger return date in 2027, and expect more Brazilian names to keep showing up deep in the fields of major live series as the online-to-live pipeline keeps producing results. Baraky’s C$400,000 score will not make headlines the way a title does, but for a player who built his reputation online, it is a statement finish on one of the biggest live stages the sport visited all year.
