PokerStars on FanDuel’s Maryland Championship Starts This Week
The 16-event series at Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland runs through Sept. 7 and tops out with a $1,700 Main Event and a €10,000 EPT package giveaway.
The Maryland State Poker Championship from PokerStars on FanDuel starts this week, with the first events scheduled for Aug. 26 at Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland and the series running through Sept. 7. The Pokerfuse Rail post places the championship in its “Today” section under “More from this week.”
As reported in July, PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel took title sponsorship of the 2026 Maryland State Poker Championship and put more than $1 million in guarantees behind the festival. The headline Main Event carries a $1,700 buy-in and a $500,000 guarantee, and it runs Sept. 3 to 7. Buy-ins across the schedule start at $400.
PokerSites.org says the lineup includes 16 trophy events over 13 days, which gives players multiple trophy chances across the weekends. The report also says each event winner gets an entry into a drawing for a Player’s Choice European Poker Tour package worth €10,000. That prize includes a €5,300 EPT Main Event seat, hotel accommodation, and travel to an EPT stop chosen by the winner.
The same report places Maryland in a crowded late-August launch window for live poker. It says Texas Card House launched its Trailblazer Poker Tour Season III on Aug. 25, the WSOP Circuit returned to Hard Rock Tulsa on Aug. 26, and a Summer Colorado Poker Championship opens the same day at Bally’s Black Hawk. It describes late August through September as the sweet spot in the American live calendar, after the World Series has wrapped up and before the autumn circuit gets fully going.
More broadly, it says regional championships now sit at the center of U.S. live poker, with the $300 to $2,000 tier forming the backbone of the domestic circuit. In that context, the report says PokerStars on FanDuel sponsoring a Maryland state championship is mostly a brand-building move because the operator does not currently offer online poker in Maryland, while also signaling confidence about where the regulatory map may be headed.
