The World Series of Poker $10,000 no-limit hold’em main event is the greatest poker tournament in the history of the game. That’s hardly a bold proclamation to make, because what other tournament in poker has so clearly separated itself from the rest that it is commonly just referred to as the main event?
When Mike McDermott triumphs at the end of the cult classic movie Rounders , beating his nemesis Teddy KGB to regain his bankroll, guess which tournament he had his heart set on playing? No surprise here. It’s the one that has attracted 115,501 players over the last 51 years, with an astounding $1,090,462,626 in prize money awarded along the way.
Perhaps even more incredible, more than $1 billion of that total, or almost 94 percent, has been paid out since 2004. That year, of course, was the first main event of the poker boom that was in large part kickstarted by online satellite qualifier Chris Moneymaker’s win in 2003. The Tennessee accountant with the too-good-to-be-true surname turned an $86 longshot into $2.5 million and a championship gold bracelet, putting a spotlight on the poker world and its colorful characters in the process.
Humble Beginnings
The participants of the very first WSOP had no way of knowing just how big of a global phenomenon the event would ultimately become. In fact, the first WSOP resembled more of a single-table cash game than a tournament series.
According to poker historian Nolan Dalla, Binion’s Horseshoe didn’t even have a poker room at the time. In 1970, a handful of players simply got together and played cash games over the span of a few days. When the game broke up, the competitors took a vote and elected Johnny Moss the first-ever WSOP champion.
“Originally, all this was just a good way of getting poker players to Las Vegas. That was the original intent of it, and it sure looks like it accomplished that goal,” 10-time WSOP bracelet winner Doyle Brunson told Card Player in 2018.
Brunson said that he and the other high-stakes players of the era could have never dreamed of the scale of […]
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