The WSOP from another angle

BlocodaBarra - Bruno Santos

18 July 2025

Now that the we know who the World Series of Poker Main Event  “October 9” finalists are, it’s time to take a different look  at the WSOP phenomenon.

Everybody that has ever played Poker dreams of having a WSOP bracelet, there´s the WSOPE in Europe but winning it at Uncle Sam´s always has a special taste to it and not even Black Friday could prevent the players from making the World Series of Poker 2012 a success.

It is estimated the Pokerstars and Full Tilt used to contribute indirectly from 3 to 5 million USD to the WSOP prize pool.

We are talking about approximately 500 players on the Main Event. The closure of the US market to all the poker rooms (or almost) may have had some impact on the Main event but it´s unlikely that it had the same effect on the 1k and 1.5k events. The smaller online poker rooms usually offer packages to smaller events and the only change should be that these packages are not available to US players anymore.

This year we saw the most famous poker pros fiercely fighting for a WSOP win on. I’m not saying that they didn´t want to win before but now with less sponsors and no Online Poker in the US it looked like all the pros  were especially  eager to find some “dead money”  again at the tables.

I talk about “dead money” because everybody that just wants to get a feeling of what the WSOP are about ends up playing these tournaments, in the two years I’ve had the pleasure of covering the WSOP I can say that I’ve never seen so many Hawaiian shirts and holiday wear.

The tourists and occasional players flock from al the US and even from abroad and fill up the rooms of the Rio Hotel and Casino convention center to play and socialize.

Poker is a social game that everybody in the US plays and that helps make these events a huge success.

Players like Brent Hanks,Ylon Schwartz, Matt Mattros, Andy Bloch or Dominik Nitsche  got a bracelet this year on the “cheap” events up to $1.5k for example.

If we look at the Top20 of each tournament we can find even more famous players,the last days of the “cheap” events are filled with poker superstars.

All of this confirms my opinion about poker players and the future of poker in the US and worldwide. Poker players are smart people and were able to adapt after the end of online in the US, no matter how long it takes poker will return to Uncle Sam´s and will survive until then.