The 25kFantasy Points Gap Is Already Enormous

Three Tiers, One Week

Seven days into the 2026 WSOP, the 25kFantasy leaderboard at 25kfantasy.com has already fractured into three distinct tiers. The top cluster of teams has pulled away from the middle pack, and the middle pack has separated from a bottom group that may already be drawing dead on a payout.

The fascinating part: no bracelets have been awarded yet. Every point scored so far has come from Day 1 bags, Day 2 advances, and min-cash locks. The scoring system at 25kFantasy rewards survival and chip accumulation at intermediate stages, which means the value of a deep run starts accruing long before a winner's photo gets taken. And that accrual has not been evenly distributed.

The scoring system at 25kFantasy rewards survival and chip accumulation at intermediate stages, which means the value of a deep run starts accruing long before a winner's photo gets taken.

What the Leaderboard Actually Looks Like

Forty user queries in the past seven days have asked some version of "how are my horses doing" across active events. That volume of interest reflects a player base watching chip counts refresh on Bravo and mentally converting bag sizes into fantasy points in real time.

The structural question underneath all that tracking: how much of the current leaderboard separation is draft skill versus draft luck?

Consider the math. With 24 teams operating under a salary cap, every roster represents a set of bets on which players will fire the most events and survive the deepest. A team that drafted two players who both bagged Day 2s in the first three events is sitting on a points cushion that compounds as those players advance. A team whose horses busted early in Events 1 through 3 is not just behind on points. They're behind on opportunities, because those early events seed deep runs that generate the biggest fantasy bonuses.

The Optimal-Draft Mirage

Fourteen queries in the past week have focused on scoring math: what each fantasy point is worth in dollar value given the $25K buy-in and field size, how the field bonus works, and how many players qualify for it.

Those are the right questions. The dollar value per fantasy point shifts as the contest plays out, but the denominator is fixed: 24 teams, one prize pool. What changes is the numerator, and the numerator is driven by how many of your drafted players are still alive in multi-day events.

Here is the uncomfortable reality for teams in the bottom tier. The gap between what an optimal draft could have scored through seven days and what the actual leading team has scored is meaningful, but the gap between the leading team and the trailing teams is larger. That means the best-performing rosters are capturing a high percentage of available points, while the worst-performing rosters are capturing almost none.

This is not a situation where "everyone is bunched up and one big final table changes everything." The separation is structural.

What Matters From Here

The ODB projections on the Charlotte side will start to reflect adjusted values for players who have already locked points versus players who have fired and missed. Draft prices at 25kfantasy.com were set before the series began. The market has moved. Players like Wasserson and Verderamo, whose names have circulated in user queries about specific roster tracking, represent the kind of mid-tier salary picks whose early results determine whether a team sits in the top cluster or the bottom one.

Bracelet events will eventually award hardware, and the scoring bonuses for a bracelet win are significant enough to reshuffle the standings. But the teams best positioned to capture those bonuses are the ones whose horses are still alive in Day 2s and Day 3s right now, not the ones hoping for a single lucky bullet in Event #14.

The leaderboard is not final. But the shape of it is already visible, and that shape has three layers, not one.