The Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, the GUKPT, reaches its 20th season in 2026, which makes it comfortably the longest-running poker tour in the country. Two decades is a long time in poker, and the tour has become the backbone of the British live calendar, the series that regional players build their year around. If you play live in the UK, here is the shape of the 2026 season and how to think about which stops to target.
A big season for a big anniversary
The 2026 GUKPT runs nine legs, and around them sit the Grosvenor UK Open, the Goliath and the Behemoth, so the year is denser than a nine-stop count suggests. Combined, the Main Event guarantees across the season total around 5.7 million pounds, which tells you the scale the tour now operates at.
The venues are a tour of British poker itself. London's Victoria Casino, the Vic, anchors the calendar as always, with Blackpool, Coventry, Leeds, Luton and Manchester's Bury New Road room all returning. The standout addition for the anniversary season is a first-ever GUKPT stop in Glasgow, running a 1,000 pound Main Event with a 200,000 pound guarantee, which brings the tour to Scotland for the first time in its history.
The tour's two flagships beyond the legs
Two events attached to the season deserve their own mention. The Goliath, held at the Coventry Building Society Arena, is the tour's monster: a 200 pound buy-in with an estimated 2 million pound prize pool, the largest live tournament in Europe outside Las Vegas, and it doubles as a GUKPT leg. It is covered in full in the Goliath 2026 Survival Guide. The UK Open, a 1,500 pound event, sits at the higher-buy-in end of the calendar for players who want a tougher, deeper field.
How to plan your GUKPT year
The beauty of a tour this size is that you can build a sensible schedule around your bankroll and your geography rather than chasing every stop. Pick the legs within reach, target the structures that suit your game, and treat the big-guarantee Main Events as the ones worth travelling for.
Whichever stops you choose, the preparation is the same. GUKPT Main Events draw solid but beatable regional fields, so the edge comes from disciplined fundamentals rather than fancy play. Keep your pricing and hand reading sharp with a few minutes of the Pot Odds Trainer and Range Reduction each morning of a festival, and get your deep-stage ICM comfortable with the help of ICM for Final Tables. Above all, treat a season of festivals as a bankroll question: set aside a roll that can absorb the variance of a year of live tournaments, track every entry and expense in the bankroll tracker, and read How Many Buy-ins Do You Need before you commit to a full season on the road.
Twenty years of British poker, and a season worth planning around. Turn up prepared. Start training free at drills.poker.