The Asia Pacific Poker Tour opens its Korean stop on Thursday, September 3 at Paradise City Incheon, headlined by a ₩1,800,000 Main Event carrying a ₩1,000,000,000 guarantee — roughly US$700,000. The festival runs twelve days to September 14, and the schedule numbering stretches past event #61, making it one of the deeper APPT stops of the year rather than a Main-Event-and-filler affair.
Paradise City sits minutes from Incheon International, which is the practical reason this stop keeps growing: a player flying in from Taipei, Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City can be at a table the same afternoon they land, without a domestic transfer.
The Main Event lands late, and it lands big
Day 1 flights for the ₩1.8M (about $1,260) Main Event don’t begin until September 10 — the back half of the festival — and play runs through to a September 14 finish. The ₩1B guarantee is the largest number on the schedule by a wide margin, and it is a real guarantee rather than a soft target: Paradise City has absorbed fields in this range before.
Running alongside it from September 10 is the ₩10,000,000 APPT Super High Roller, the single most expensive buy-in of the series at roughly $7,000. It is the only listed event without a published guarantee, which usually signals a small, uncapped, re-entry-driven field rather than a shortfall risk.
Where the mid-stakes value actually sits
The schedule is front-loaded with softer entry points. The Paradise City Kickoff starts things on September 3 at ₩600,000 (about $420) with ₩75M guaranteed. A three-day Mystery Bounty follows from September 4 at ₩900,000 with ₩150M guaranteed, and a 20/15/10 Multi Flight Challenge on September 6 comes in at ₩500,000 with ₩50M up top.
The APPT National — historically the biggest field of any APPT stop — runs September 7 to 10 at ₩1,200,000 with ₩250M guaranteed. A Survivor Knockout with a flat ₩1.5M bounty on every player fills the September 9-10 slot at ₩750,000.
Two events close the festival on September 13-14: the ₩850,000 Mini Main Event with ₩100M guaranteed, and the ₩5,000,000 APPT High Roller, which matches the National’s ₩250M guarantee off roughly four times the buy-in.
Incheon’s second festival in five weeks
This is the same room that hosted APT Incheon from August 7 to 16, a stop that produced a chaotic heads-up finish and back-to-back titles for Cheng Han Pang. Two full international festivals at one venue inside five weeks is a stress test for any poker room’s dealer pool and table count — and a decent proxy for how much traffic Korea is now pulling off the regional circuit.
The contrast between the two is worth noting. APT Incheon leaned on volume and a mixed-game slate. APPT Korea is a tighter, PokerStars-branded build: fewer formats, larger guarantees per event, and a buy-in ladder that steps cleanly from ₩500K to ₩10M with nothing awkward in between.
For anyone planning the trip, the useful detail is the ten-day runway before the Main Event. You can arrive for the Kickoff, play four guaranteed events, and still have the ₩1B centrepiece and both high rollers ahead of you — a schedule shape that rewards a full two-week stay far more than a weekend fly-in.