47th Annual WSOP breaks all-time money and attendance records!
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It’s been another year of broken records for the WSOP with $221 million+ and hundreds of thousands in attendance throughout the premier poker tournament’s 2016 professional circuit, culminating at the Rio All-Star and Casino in Las Vegas
The 47th annual event continued to smash through records this year over the course of the seven week, 69-event poker festival running from the 31st of May to the 19th of July, coming to an end today.
A gargantuan 107,833 entrants took part in this year’s WSOP tour, up 4.2% from 2015. This was the second time since the genesis of the tournament that has attracted more than 100,000 people; solidly reinforcing the fact that the WSOP is still the most popular poker body.
Records have been smashed continually over the last few months including the highest amount of nations to play (107), and the most people to cash in one tournament (15,767). The figure of 15,000 was dotted about quite often this year as this was more than the total players for the first 35 years of the tournament’s existence. This marked the first year of the 15% payout field, as opposed to the previous 10% average — creating more winners than ever before.
Average participation per event was up to 1,563 — the highest in the WSOP’s 47-year history. Markedly increasing the difficulty to attain a gold bracelet, players had to battle through over 1562 other contestants, increasing the value of attaining the top-tier prize to another level.
The main event — with a top prize of $8 million — received 6,737 entries in total, a 5% increase on last year. This created the largest ever prize pool of $63,327,800.
“It’s bittersweet to close up poker’s version of the Olympics after such a successful and rewarding summer,” Poker Executive Director Ty Stewart said. “We will get to work planning a bigger and better World Series of Poker in 2017 and on behalf of the entire WSOP team, thank all the players for making the 2016 version of this event the smoothest in our history.”
With the WSOP getting bigger and better there’s never been a better time to get involved. With Coral offering various satellites into key tournaments you could go from online poker amateur to WSOP poker pro! One thing is clear though — the WSOP is going nowhere!
