WSOP: The Beginning, The Best and The Boom
Poker players anxiously look forward to the World Series of Poker every year, but we rarely look back at why the WSOP is the most successful tournament series in the world. Here's a summary of how it started, alongside a few of the most memorable moments in WSOP history.
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| Johnny Moss |
The World Series of Poker began in 1970, and at that point it wasn't even a poker tournament.
The players with the best reputations in Las Vegas got together for a few days of high-stakes play, and at the end they voted on Johnny Moss as the champion amongst them. Moss repeated in 1971 by winning a 7-player Sit & Go which started the tradition of determining the champion via a tournament.
In the last few years, the World Series has consisted of 50+ events each year, and thousands of poker players travel to Las Vegas each summer to participate. The 2006 Main Event is the largest that the Championship has ever been, with 8,773 players entering.
What happened between 1970 and now that allowed the WSOP to capture the interest of the world?
Memorable WSOP Moments
In 1972, "Amarillo Slim" Preston won the WSOP Championship, and decided to highly publicize his victory across the United States. Due to the newly found national interest in the game, CBS Sports covered the World Series for the first time in 1973.
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| Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar |
In 1980, a young Stu Ungar traveled from his home in New York to the WSOP and beat a field which was overwhelmingly comprised of older players from Texas and Nevada. He beat Doyle Brunson, who had won in both 1976 and 1977, heads-up. Interest in Ungar influenced NBC to televise the event on a wide scale in 1981, and Ungar won again.
Johnny Chan became the dominant tournament player by the late 80s, and he won back-to-back Main Events in 1987 and 1988, a feat that remains one of the most impressive in WSOP history.
Chan's 1988 victory over Erik Seidel is one of the best known tournament finishes ever, as it was prominently featured in the 1998 film "Rounders". Chan came in 2nd place in 1989 as well, losing to Phil Hellmuth.
The 1990s was a time of steady growth for the World Series, and it was helped along by increased television coverage and the start of internet poker. However, it wasn't until 2003 that poker exploded.
The Poker Boom
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| Chris Moneymaker |
Chris Moneymaker, an amateur player from Nashville, Tennessee won his seat to the WSOP Main Event by playing a satellite on PokerStars. He turned $40 into a $10,000 seat, and more importantly he beat a field full of professional players to win $2,500,000.
Although the World Series had grown slowly up until that point, Moneymaker's win caused an amazing spike in attendance. The 2004 WSOP that followed his win saw over three times as many entrants as 2003 had, and the television coverage of Moneymaker's victory was replayed more than any other poker event in history.
Dreams of turning a small sum of money into millions of dollars caused the number of people playing poker to grow rapidly for the next several years. Today, the WSOP is an international event where thousands of players travel to compete at the game they love.
One of the few things that has remained the same throughout the modern history of poker is the importance of the World Series. Though the game itself is largely the same as it was in 1970, the poker world has come a long way since the days of voting on a champion.
