Are you a poker aficionado? If you answered no, you likely would have had no clue that the World Series of Poker (WSOP) just ended 2 weeks ago and certainly wouldn’t know that Jonathan Tamayo from Humble Texas walked away with the bracelet and $10 million first prize in the main event when his 3-8 offsuit beat Jordan Giff’s 6-9 offsuit after a 3 and 8 came up on the flop.  In year’s past many non-poker fans would know the winner and possibly have been following it on ESPN.

There’s no question that for professional players the intrigue and prestige of the WSOP is still there. After all, the 2024 main event had a record 10,112 entrants who were either willing to pony up the $10,000 entry fee or won a satellite tournament to enter. But for casual fans of the game who enjoyed viewing and were intrigued by it, that interest has simply faded away.

Interest in poker as a whole has always been cyclical. Poker has been played among friends and families for decades. In some decades it was commonplace and in other decades it waned as that generation may not have had the same interest as the generation before. But for recreational home games, and even games in legal poker rooms, the usual types of poker played were either draw poker, stud poker or a variation there of.  Texas Hold 'em was virtually unknown until the late 1960s.

Texas Hold 'em was actually invented in the early 1900s in Robstown, Texas but never really gained popularity until it was offered in Las Vegas in 1969 when The Dune Casino decided to have a tournament with several types of poker, including hold ‘em, in a competition called the Gambling Fraternity Convention. It was a series of live real money poker games and the first winner was Crandell Addington,who won the most money from all the games played. Addington was a millionaire and philanthropist who just passed away this April but was only really known as the first winner of what would become the WSOP. The following year, Benny and Jack Binion took over the tournament and changed the name to the World Series of Poker. The 1970 tournament was an invitation for the best seven poker players in the world at that time namely Addington, Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, Pugsy Pearson, Carl Cannon and the winner of the tournament, Johnny Moss. Unlike the previous year’s tournament, the 1970 WSOP had no actual post up or prize money, but the winner received a silver cup and the title best poker player in the world. It also was the first Texas Hold ‘em freeze out tournament meaning that once you lost all your chips you were removed from the tournament. In 1971 players were forced to put up a $5,000 entry fee with a winner taking all format and again Johnny Moss beat out five others to take home the $30,000 prize. From 1972 onwards, the buy-in fee was $10,000 which kept the number of players low, since in 1972 that fee is the equivalent of about $75,000 today. Like 1971, it stayed a winner take all tournament until 1978 when 42 players entered convincing the organizers to divvy up the prize among the top 5 finishers with the winner taking home 50% of the prize.

In 1973 CBS decided to cover the final table and it made for good TV, since the players were characters and there was a circus type atmosphere around the event, similar to darts today, with announcers speculating what everybody had and people hooting and hollering at every play. Doyle Brunson, Stu Unger, Amarillo Slim, Johnny Chan and many others became folklore in the poker community. In 1989 Phil “the Mouth” Hellsmuth shocked everyone by winning the event at age 25 when poker was generally viewed as an old man’s game. Moreover, Hellmuth’s antics of taunting the other players relentlessly and complaining about bad beats helped change poker from being viewed as a gentleman’s game to a competition based on skill.

Unfortunately, interest ended after the first few years and TV stations stopped showing the WSOP because it just wasn’t good TV and as fields grew, the tournament time dragged on. But two things happened in 1998 and 1999 which changed that. In 1998 the movie Rounders was released and was a major success. The movie starring Matt Damon, Ed Norton and John Malkovich showed the excitement that poker could be and convinced a new generation that anyone with skill and commitment could make money at the game. Malkovich’s line “He beat me straight up. Pay that man his money,” became an instant tag line. And in 1999 TV stations invented the hole cam. The technology allowed viewers to see the two hole cards of players. So, instead of just watching a player check or fold not knowing what the hand was, the technology allowed viewers to be more involved in the coverage and feel as if they were playing along with the players at the table. More importantly, it taught novice poker players how to play Texas Hold ‘em successfully. The first broadcast with the hole cam was a 1999 show in the UK called The Late Night Poker Show and was an instant success there. And starting in 2002 ESPN used the hole cam as well for their WSOP coverage. The hand could only be shown on TV well after it was played so that no one in the audience could give signs to players but it changed the way the game was viewed and resulted in a renewed interest in poker in the United States. And in 2003 ESPN increased its coverage thanks to interest with the hole cam and it proved invaluable after Chris Moneymaker, a relatively unknown online player and accountant, won an $86 satellite tournament on Poker Stars enroute to a $2.5 million payday.

Moneymaker’s win changed poker forever because it showed that anybody, regardless of skill and previous success, could win at poker as long as they had the patience and misdemeanor to mix strong plays with bluffs. Moneymaker’s win led to a huge boom in online poker interest and land-based poker rooms. Suddenly it seemed that every casino which usually had no poker tables or perhaps two or 3 tables for high rollers, now had dedicated poker rooms. There were waiting lists to join $2-$5 limit tables and $1-$2 no limit tables. Vegas itself started offering a variety of regular tables and on weekends hosted no limit hold‘em freeze out or rebuy tournaments with a fee of say $20 with a top prize of $50,000. And online poker took off like never before allowing companies like PokerStars, FullTilt, Cereus Poker, Party Poker and some smaller sites to be very successful. And every online site increased the number of satellite tournaments with a WSOP ticket as the top prize and some sites offered paraphernalia and incentives to anyone that would go to the WSOP wearing their branding.

Consequently, the WSOP just kept growing. When Moneymaker won there was less than 900 entrants, but in 2004 it rose to over 2,500. Entrants doubled again in 2005 to over 5000 and 2006 to over 8,000, but dropped off slightly in 2007 after the passage of the UIGEA. It seemed that some American poker players were worried they may be breaking the law and decided to sit out, plus getting money to and from poker sites was harder after the UIGEA rules were passed.

Along with what became known as The Moneymaker Effect, something else that led to huge interest in poker were the TV shows put on by PokerStars and Full Tilt called The Big Game, High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark where paid professionals competed in tournaments to not only provide some good entertainment but also taught novice viewers how to play the game. Players like Phil Ivey, Hellsmuth, Daniel Negreanu and Tom Dwan became household names. Added to that, the World Poker Tour and European Poker Tour started airing tournaments from around the globe and at times they were some of the best watched programs on ESPN, which hired professionals to commentate on the tournaments and models like Shia Hiatt and Lynn Gilmartin to act as the hosts and interviewers.

It seemed poker interest would eventually return but that was quelled in 2011 after what became known as Black Friday, when the FBI shut down the websites of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus Network’s Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. PokerStars did eventually continue on as a non-American based site after agreeing to buy the assets of FullTilt and paying a massive fine to the Attorney General’s office, but the two Cereus sites simply closed shop leaving the players with money in their account in a lurch. Black Friday took any sail out of the ship and poker interest in the U.S. just plummeted. Without U.S. clients PokerStars decided to cancel their shows and the only thing on TV was the occasional tournaments shown by WPT. Unfortunately it seemed few cared. If Americans couldn’t play online, they saw little benefit of watching the tournaments. Moreover, there seemed to be so many tournaments on every day with tables that never concluded for weeks at a time that interest in poker as a whole dropped off.  Casinos, which started to see empty poker rooms almost immediately stated weaning them and within three years it was nearly impossible to find a poker table at a major casino, let alone a tournament as casinos couldn’t justify wasting space on a poker room where they made little when they could put in slot machines or table games in those spaces.

Yet despite the low interest by TV viewers and casual players, the WSOP still continued to draw a large clientele, with players outside of the United States taking up a much larger percentage of the entrants. Every year from 2012 to this year the tournament exceeded 6,000 entrants with most entrants living outside of the United States, the one exception being 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a confusing online setup. Americans played against each other on WSOP.com and non-Americans played against each other on GGPoker.com with the winners of each coming together in Las Vegas for a final table, where Damian Salas of Argentina defeated Joseph Hebert of Louisiana in a tournament nobody watched and few cared about. In fact, a $5,000 buy in online-only tournament hosted by GGPoker was far more of a highlight than the WSOP main event and many still believe that Stoyan Madanzhiev was the real winner of the 2020 WSOP.

But while players are still entering in droves, viewership has not gone along with it. ESPN which aired the events for over two decades gave up the rights and the tournament is only available to watch live now on something called PokerGO, a Las Vegas based streaming service. For the last three years the only way to watch the tournament live was to pay a subscription fee, which not surprisingly few were willing to do. Repeats of the WSOP tournaments are available on lesser subscribed to ESPN channels but they are usually aired in the middle of the night to make sure it doesn’t take away from more well viewed sports like Pickleball and Cornhole.

So again, who won this year’s tournament? It was Jonathan Tamayo. And who won last year? Why it was Daniel Wineman of course and prior to him it was Espen Jorstad. But unless you truly follow poker religiously you would likely have had no clue who won and probably have already forgotten their names. In fact, the last name that casual poker followers would likely know is Jonathan Duhamel, who won in 2010 prior to Black Friday when his A-J offsuit held up to beat John Racener. And the truth is that poker has become so non-descript as a spectator event the sportsbooks stopped offering odds on it. In prior years one would find odds to win the tournament, to reach the final table, highest finishing woman in the tournament, nationality of the winner, etc. But nowadays there is nothing anywhere, including at sportsbooks offshore and in Europe where they are not constrained by rules that may prohibit those types of bets.

Can poker ever return to its glory days?

Perhaps, but it is going to require a major shift in attitude and perhaps a generation that is long removed from the painful memories of Black Friday. It will also likely require all states with sportsbooks to start legalizing online casinos and poker so that tables can fill up and sportsbook players will start to learn the game and learn how to play successfully as happened previously. But one thing is certain, the WSOP itself will always draw huge fields even if there are few TV viewers to see it.

Read insights from Hartley Henderson every week here at OSGA and check out Hartley's RUMOR MILL!