A little WSOP History

The first World Series of Poker (WSOP) was organized by Las Vegas pioneer Benny Binion and inspired by a 5 month heads up match between Nick "The Greek" Dandolos and Johnny Moss which had taken place in 1949. During that historic match Moss reportedly won between two and three million dollars, but more important to Binion were the crowds that gathered to watch the spectacle. The first World Series of Poker which took place at Binion's Horseshoe in 1970 was nothing more than a high stakes game that went on for several days designed to draw people into the casino. The game was populated by seven of the foremost players of the day and the champion was determined by a simple popular vote among the players. The following year the event adopted a tournament format and 13 entrants each put up $10,000. All of the money went to the winner, Johnny Moss, who was not coincidently also the previous years champion. As the tournament grew, more events were added with smaller buy-ins. While players competed in various forms of poker during these preliminary events (in 1988 there were 12 events total), the main event remained No limit Texas hold 'em.

A few revolutionary happenings came together around 2003 that led to an explosion in poker popularity and shaped the WSOP as we know it today. In 2002 the travel channel made a deal with the organizers of 13 of the largest existing annual poker tournaments to film the play of the final six players. This wasn't the first time poker had been on TV, but the key difference between these and previous broadcasts was tiny cameras in the table (called lipstick cameras) that allowed the viewers to see every players hole cards. In the past watching poker had been like watching paint dry, but now all the bets, bluffs and blunders were there for everyone to see. The following year ESPN jumped on the poker bandwagon when they filmed the 2003 WSOP in a similar manner. The main motivation for this endeavor was the NHL hockey strike which left huge holes in ESPN's prime time line up. They filled these holes with poker.

The internet also played a huge role in poker's growth. While you could play poker for money online as early as 1998 it took a few years to work out the bugs and even longer for people to trust that the games were fair, safe, and secure. But, once that started to happen it meant that people who didn't live within 500 miles of a card room or casino could get in the action. In fact the eventual winner of the 2003 WSOP main event was an unknown accountant named Chris Moneymaker (his real name!) who got into the tournament by playing a $40 internet qualifier. He parlayed that $40 into a 2.5 million dollar payday after beating 849 of the worlds best (and a few of the worst) players. The following year the size of the field in the main event tripled to over 2,500 entrants. In 2005 the tournament grew by leaps and bounds again to over 5,600 entrants (that's a prize pool of over 56 million dollars!) with a first place of 7.5 million dollars (plus everyone in the top 9 won at least a million dollars). This was the biggest cash prize in television history and in fact even if you won all 4 of golf's major tournaments (The Masters, The U.S. Open, The British Open, and the PGA Championship) you'd still come up short of the prize money for first at the WSOP! This year there are 45 events scheduled and the main event is expected to draw around 8,000 entrants. I'll be among those 8,000 and while 7,200 of us will be coming home with nothing but a story I'm planning to be one of the 800 winners.

How Poker and Poker Tournaments Work

How does this whole Texas Hold 'em thing work anyway? If you're familiar with hold 'em and the way tournaments work you can skip this section. For those of you who don't know how Texas Hold 'em works you can check out the following link which has a brief description of the procedures as well as a few pictures to help you figure it all out.

http://www.fulltiltpoker.net/holdem.php

You'll probably need to refer back to this link to understand a good deal of what I'm saying in my daily updates. Once you've got that down it's important to understand the way poker tournaments work. In many poker games people play for cash. In those games players can come and go whenever they chose and if they run out of chips they can simply buy more. In a tournament, however, once you've paid your entry fee you're locked in and if you run out of chips you can't buy more and are eliminated from the tournament.

Lets look at a simple example which will illustrate a few of the finer points. Imagine you have 100 players who each buy into a $100 tournament which gives us a $10,000 pile of money. In return for this $100 entry fee the players each get $1,000 in tournament chips (tournament chips are always referred to in units of dollars, but they're not actually worth anything; they are just betting units). In a situation like this the blinds might start at 10/20 (meaning a $10 small blind and $20 big blind). After 20 minutes of play the blinds might be increased to 20/40 and then to 30/60 after another 20 minutes and so on. After a while those 1,000 chips each player started with don't seem like so much and eventually are forced to put all their chips at risk on a single hand. If a player runs out of chips he or she is eliminated and leaves the tournament. Now it's time to split up that $10,000 pile of money we started with. First and foremost the casino or whoever is running the tournament takes their piece of the pie off the top (usually around 10%). After "the house" takes their $1,000 fee we're left with $9,000 which gets split up amongst the top 10 finishers. The tenth place player would normally get about $150 gross ($50 net). Not too exciting after beating out 90 other players, but much better than 11th place. The first place player would usually get about $3,500. Pretty sweet for a $100 risk. The other eight places would be somewhere in between with each place paying slightly more than the previous.

Sometimes when there are only a few players left (usually less than 5) the players will agree to split all of the remaining prize money based on how many chips each player has. In our example Let's say 1st place is $3,500, 2nd is $2,000, and 3rd is $1,500. Player A has 50,000 chips and player B has 40,000 chips and player C has 10,000 chips. Assuming all the players are of equal skill Player A has the best chance of winning because he has the most chips and player C has very little chance of winning (and not much chance of getting second either) with player B somewhere in the middle. But, crazy things happen all the time in poker and maybe the players want to lock up their profits and avoid the stress of playing for big money. If they agreed on a deal based on chip count player A would get $2,750, player B would get $2,500 and player C would get $1,750. Players A and B get MORE that 2nd place money and player C gets a little something extra when he's probably toast anyway. It's easy to see why deals are attractive. I play tournaments of this type every day. On the internet you can play tournaments with buys ins ranging from as little a 10 cents to as much as $5,000 and every amount in between. And in person you can play tournaments with buy ins between $10 and $50,000. Anyone can play in 99.9% of these tournaments, they just have to put up the money.

WSOP tournaments work just like my example except instead of 100 people putting up $100 each, you might have 1,000 people putting up $2,000 each. In a situation like this 1000th place to 101st place would pay nothing. 100th place would pay around $2,200, 10th place might pay about $25,000 and first place would pay about $500,000. You can get a sense of what the other places might pay and it's easy to see that you really need to go deep into these tournaments to be successful in the long run.

Welcome to My Blog!

Welcome to my blog! Hopefully this blog will be a place where my friends, family, and jerks that I know can get updates and stories direct from the World Series of Poker (WSOP). For those of you who are poker savvy I'll include as many details as I can remember about key hands and reknowned poker players that I compete against. For those of you who aren't I'll try to include as many explanations of terms and concepts as I can. So no matter who you are plan to be either confused or bored much of the time that you'll be reading my blog! I'll have my laptop with me and I plan to write something at least once a day and most likely before and after every tournament. You can sign up with blogarithm (there's a little white box on the right hand side towards the top of my blog) and they'll let you know when I've updated my blog (although they only check a once a day).

Before I go any further I'd like to thank my wife Jen for not only helping me set up this blog and making the costume I'm wearing in the picture (they say dress for success), but for fully supporting me in this endeavor which could end up costing us tens of thousands of dollars. I'll be the first to admit that coming home with my pockets completely emptied is a very real possibility. But there's also a chance that I could be bringing home hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars as well as some degree of fame and a boat load of respect from my peers. That's the dream and that's my goal.

I'd also like to thank Gerry Lopez, E.B. Sandberg, Matt Lessinger and Jake Chapman who between the four of them have put up $13,500 of the $30,000 bankroll I'll be using for tournament buy-ins. I have plenty of confidence in myself, but it's great to know that these guys have enough confidence in me to put their hard earned money at risk.

I hope you enjoy my blog! Please comment whenever you feel inclined to do so and feel free to e-mail me at wesdave1279@yahoo.com to express any thoughts you might have or hopefully to wish me congratulations on winning large amounts of money.