Tables are shown in Ballys Grand Ballroom during a preview of the World Series of Poker set-up at Bally’s and Paris Las Vegas Thursday, May 26, 2022. The WSOP begins May 31. Ty Stewart ducked down to read a question off a computer monitor from an online audience during a World Series of Poker news conference Thursday afternoon at Bally’s Las Vegas.
The question asked Stewart, the WSOP’s executive director, to make a prediction on the number of players who will enter the $10,000 buy-in Main Event later this summer. By his own admission, such an inquiry has prompted Stewart to keep his head lowered and give a non-answer in past years.
But this time around, Stewart looked up, smirked and spoke with conviction.
“I will be on record this year as taking the ‘over’ 8,774 (players),” he said. “There’s no reason for us to not break the all-time Main Event record. I expect that we will do it.”
The previous record for Main Event entrants came in 2006 when poker’s traditional world championship event attracted 8,773 players. It’s rarely come close to topping that figure ever since with an average of 6,558 players per year including 6,650 last November.
But organizers say this year is different. Everything, including the Main Event, is going to be bigger when the 2022 World Series of Poker kicks off on Tuesday May 31 for its debut run at Bally’s and Paris Las Vegas.
“We’re now positioned to be a total Las Vegas experience,” Stewart said, “not just a poker tournament.”
The WSOP had been held at the Rio since 2004, a year before the tournaments’ current power duo of Stewart and Vice President/Tournament Director Jack Effel started working exclusively on the event. Relocation rumors had persisted for nearly a decade, but officially got put into motion when Caesars Entertainment sold the Rio in 2019.
The move became official at the conclusion of last year’s delayed event — because of the pandemic, it was the first time since Caesars acquired the WSOP that it wasn’t staged in the summer. Some may have expected Caesars to carry over virtually the same WSOP […]
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