In 2024, the World Series of Poker celebrated its 55th anniversary, putting on yet another colossal event for thousands of aspiring card players to attend. With 99 coveted bracelet events on the schedule and a bunch of flashy-named new competitions – such as the Pot-Limit Omaha Mystery Bounty event and Double Bomb Pot event – the tournament lived up to its lofty standards once again, culminating in an epic Main Event.
The $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event commenced on 3 July and attracted 10,112 entries. This marked the largest World Series of Poker Main Event field in the competition’s history. Over $94 million was shared between the top 1,517 contenders, while the outright winner, Jonathan Tamayo, got themselves a cool $10 million by winning at the final table on 16 and 17 July.
Even now, it’s quite spectacular that professional poker – a sport with little by way of physical athleticism or even a ticking clock to spice up proceedings – remains so captivating. It’s because of this that the brand was sold by Caesars Entertainment in August 2024 for a mighty $500 million. Yet, as part of the deal, Caesars will continue to host the World Series of Poker in its Las Vegas venues for the next 20 years.
How did the televised major poker tournament end up being worth $500 million – and probably more, given that Caesars gets to retain the hosting rights?
The Poker Boom Continues to Reverberate
While professional poker had long seen huge sums of money wagered and won at tables in land-based casinos and between wealthy friends in more private settings, the sheer volume of players and pots increased tremendously around the turn of the millennium. Two key elements played into what is now known as the ‘Poker Boom’ of the 2000s, with both elements greatly increasing the accessibility and entertainment value of the sport.
Of the two elements, the most enduring and influential to this day is the advent of online poker, its deployment as a legitimate path to the World Series of Poker, and an amateur online poker player going all the way. It was a perfect storm that sent poker through the room as a sport with intriguing storylines and big characters to follow as well as a big-money event that anyone with the skill and drive could win.
The man who achieved this feat was Chris Moneymaker. At 27 years old, the amateur poker player won passage to the 2003 World Series of Poker via an online satellite tournament with an $86 buy-in. Arriving in Las Vegas, the man from Tennessee had to battle past a field of some 838 other players. Achieving this and winning $2.5 million as the champion of the Main Event, Moneymaker became an overnight sensation and the poster boy of the event.
Now known as “The Moneymaker Effect” poker skyrocketed in popularity, and the very next year, a field of 2,576 players witnessed semi-pro player Greg Raymer make it to the Main Event. The fact that all of this was made possible by playing online poker fuelled the poker craze. The most accessible card games, like Texas Hold’em, became the go-to ways to play, and online poker platforms surged to prominence.
To this day, the Poker Boom’s reverberations can still be felt online. The surge in interest led to a crowded field of competitors in online poker, and while some fell by the wayside in the 2010s, those that remain continue to remain competitive to win over the millions of poker players that now exist. Now, the best sites not only boast large player bases, but they also have rewards, bonuses, sprawling game selections, and strong reputations.
As Entertaining as Ever
The second catalyst for the Poker Boom, alongside the incredible scenes made by Chris Moneymaker, was poker becoming a sports broadcast. Naturally, it was this aspect that even allowed Moneymaker to become such a huge story, with people tuning in to see if the amateur from Tennessee could beat some of the most vaunted names in the game for millions of dollars.
While Moneymaker’s success didn’t come until 2003, the groundwork for this aspect of the Poker Boom began in 1999. TV producer Steve Lipscomb made a World Series of Poker documentary but couldn’t get a series off the ground. So, he founded the World Poker Tour – which continues today – so that they could televise a major poker event. Running from June 2002 to April 2003, the inaugural broadcast collected a peak of 2.2 million concurrent viewers.
Before the World Poker Tour, poker had been on television. The Main Event of the World Series of Poker got an hour-long slot on ESPN in the past, but it moved to the Discovery Networks in 1999, 2000, and 2001, and still as a one-hour documentary-style show. ESPN got it back in 2002 but only used pocket cam technology in limited fashion just as the World Poker Tour was about to air.
World Poker Tour decided to step it up from there, creating the hole cam and adding plenty of interactive graphics to replicate the live sports immersion seen in the likes of the NFL. Shown on the Travel Channel, it was a huge hit, and for the 2003 showing of the World Series of Poker, ESPN opted to adopt much of what the World Poker Tour had pioneered to enhance the Main Event. It was just in time for Moneymaker to make a splash.
Now, poker still manages to get decent-sized audiences on television across North America, often reportedly sitting upwards of 500,000 for the Main Event. While this isn’t quite as up there as in the earlier days of the Poker Boom, the sport is still finding a strong audience. As Ty Stewart, senior vice president of the World Series of Poker says, poker is predominantly absorbed through social media and streaming these days.
Across Twitch and YouTube, the 2023 World Series of Poker collected over 2.2 million viewing hours and an average viewer count of 13,556. For the topic of Poker, the Twitch Tracker sees it as having had over 500,000 hours watched, as of the time of writing, with an average viewership of over 3,000 people. On average, weekdays will have an average of between 56 and 60 channels broadcasting poker on the live-streaming platform, which peaks at 70 on Sundays. It’s a niche, but poker is certainly finding a decent audience — even in this format.
Poker looks to be in a very good place right now. Online poker continues to be wildly popular and the broadcasts that helped to make the sport such a hit continue to find audiences even in the ever-changing media landscape. The next World Series of Poker will be as big as ever while its new brand owners will look to promote and enhance the event as much as possible after such a sizeable investment.
