WSOP Main Event Kicks Off Today!
Today’s the big day! The $10,000 buy-in World Championship No Limit Hold’em tournament starts today. It’s also more well known as the main event. I’m really not sure how many people will be in this year, although I’m thinking it’s gonna be less than the 6,358 that entered last year and awarded $8.25 million to the winner. As I previously wrote about here, they’re gonna delay the final table till November. Hopefully I’ll get down to the rio and check out some of the action!
It’s pretty much the biggest prize you can have in poker. The main event winner is more or less considered the king of poker. With the explosion in online poker the last few years what’s been called the “Moneymaker effect” the numbers of entries has skyrocketed! So named for Chris Moneymaker, who was the first main event winner to win his entry online back in 2003, the effect really kicked the popularity of poker into the stratosphere!
Although the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 pretty much took a lot of the wind out of the sails of online poker from the US players. It really didn’t make the act of playing illegal, it just doesn’t allow the transfer of money from a US-based bank account or credit card. I played mostly for fun online (I have about as much luck online as in the brick and mortal casinos, which is either none or less than none depending on the day) so it didn’t affect me very much but it really put a damper on millions. Plus they also made it against the rules to directly transfer your tournament buy-in from your online account which thousands of online players had been doing.
It’s might seem weird to newer fans of poker but the crowds weren’t always this big, but realize the year Phil Hellmuth won in 1989 there was only 178 people in the main event! I remember the last year they held the whole thing at Binions, when it was still the Horseshoe, in 2004 and you couldn’t even move in there! They had poker tables jammed in every corner you could imagine! The whole thing almost got shut down by the fire marshalls too. Now they have the tournaments in one of the convention center rooms in the Rio.
Ok that’s enough rambling about the WSOP for now. I’ll update when the final table is set in a few days.