#473 - WSOP Notebook #45 - What I Saw at the World Series of Poker, Part II

This is the second part of my four-part essay giving my opinions about the 2008 World Series of Poker.

Part II - The State of Poker, According to the World Series of Poker

Amid all the negatives - UIGEA, payment-processor problems, overexposure and retreat on TV, bad economy - the depth and breadth of the devotion to poker came shining through:

* The total prize pool for all events exceeded $180 million and set a record.

* The total number of players registered for World Series events, over 54,000, set a record.

* Main Event entries totalled 6,844, 8% more than 2007 and the second-most in WSOP history.

Maybe after the yearly explosion in Main Event entries through 2006 (2003=839, 2004=2,576, 2005=5,619, 2006=8,773), every year automatically seems like a letdown. But that’s not the right way to look at it. The UIGEA and prosecutions of payment processors put a chill on Main Event entries. It made it harder for players to join online sites and keep their accounts funded. And because of Caesar’s response to the law, online sites can’t buy in for satellite winners, so the potentially-smaller pool of online qualifiers can now keep the entry money on the site and skip the Main Event.

That can’t be underrated. Satellites don’t just make tournament entries seem “cheaper” but they historically minimize the role of cold feet. Now, every one of the thousands and thousands of online qualifiers has to decide whether it’s worth it to cash out $10,000 from their online site, then decide whether to stand in that line and shell it out. That’s a lot different than winning an online tournament and picking up a ticket for a tournament whose entry fee might otherwise be unfathomably large.

I think it’s huge, therefore, that overall Series entries were bigger than ever before and Main Event entries rose from 2007 and were higher than every year but 2006.