Home / Poker News July 2013 / The 2013 WSOP Main Event Thus Far
The 2013 WSOP Main Event Thus Far
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2013-07-12 05:08
They say that hindsight is always 20/20, so with all the Day 1 and Day 2 flights of the
2013 WSOP Main Event behind us, the time is right to take a look back and analyze the numbers involved a little bit. This year, the Big Dance saw 6,352 players belly up to the tables, creating a prize pool of more than $59 million. To those who know their WSOP history, these numbers are not the least bit impressive. In fact, this year's Main Event turned out to be the smallest since 2005 when Joe Hachem ended up with the gold.
Indeed, this year, 648 players will finish in the money and those who make the final table will all be guaranteed a minimum payday of $733.2k. The winner of the event will walk away with $8.3 million, which is a nice haul at first glance, but which only serves to further underscore the decline of the Main Event, often used by experts as an indicator of the overall health of the Series. While 2013 failed to break out of the trend of about 4% participation-drop every year since Black Friday, the situation isn’t nearly as dire as mathematics would suggest.
There are other factors at work here too and before one starts writing up the obituaries for the WSOP, he/she should also point out that the WSOP still managed to draw four times as many players to a live 5-figure buy-in event as the
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and Aussie Millions main events combined.
What one also needs to bear in mind is that US players couldn’t take advantage of online qualifiers this year either and that is likely to change for next year, when WSOP.com is set to start promoting such qualifiers in Nevada and possibly even in New Jersey and other states.
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