The same as when?

The 2019 WSOP was very different than the 2009 WSOP. Even though they were in the same location and had a somewhat comparable number of players.
Pretty sure everyone who went to the 1999 and 2019 WSOP will tell us that almost everything changed since then.

I meant same as in the number of entrants. Will it ever return to 2019 numbers?

Yes, it will, but not in 2021. It will be a little lower. But still good.
2022 will be back to normal.

There are two different factors for number of entrants. The first thing is the combination of way more events over a longer period of time combined with super low buy-ins. The second thing is the ME as a bucket list item that gets cheaper to enter every year.

Those factors might keep the number of players at least flat-ish in the years to come even if some players decide for themselves that they won’t attend events like that in the future.

I highly doubt 2021 will be in any way comparable to previous years. I agree that 2022 will be back to normal. Maybe not the 2019 normal though. We might have to adjust to a slightly different “new normal”.

With most foreign nationals still barred from entering the US, does it even make sense financially for the organisers to try and run a slimmed down WSOP at the usual time of year. Surely it would make a lot more sense to wait until Fall when the whole situation is likely to look radically different.

Doesn't it feel wrong to be crowned World Champion, when the rest of the World is not invited...ooops, I forgot NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB all do exactly that!

Could you elaborate? I'd like to hear your perspective on how things changed. First year I went to WSOP was 2016 (I also went 2017 and 2018).

Might sound stupid and maybe I can't find the perfect words to describe it, but in the years before Black Friday the WSOP was some kind of rockstar experience. Except for one $1k NLHE event on kick-off weekend, there wasn't a single regular bracelet event with a buy-in below $1500. Online poker rooms had awesome VIP areas except you didn't have to be a real VIP to be able to hang out there. Lots of big name sponsors had their own booth around the tournament area.

Ten years later, there are 20ish low buy-in events and every second vendor sells vaping devices and stuff like that. I'm certainly not blaming the WSOP for catering to a different crowd. Just pointing out that things have changed.

And remember the Poker Lifestyle Convention that was held in Pavillion for a few years, where every hopeful online poker startup site or business was throwing out free branded schwag, those were the days!

All the overhead rigging is custom built for Rio. It would cost millions to move it to a new venue. Very unlikely it will move this year.

Yeah, I remember playing in a $1,500 event 7 or 8 years ago as more of a bucket list type thing to play a bracelet event as I normally go out during the summer and play a few lower buy in tournaments ($250-400). I think I've played 3 bracelet events, one in each of the last 3 WSOPs and haven't spent $1,500 combined in them.

They even feel different though. They feel more like the daily deepstacks that they run than an actual bracelet event to me. There just isn't that prestige or wow factor to the Colossus, Big Fifty, etc... Of course, they have gotten my money in the prize pool instead of it going towards an event at the Venetian or Planet Hollywood.

Not a concern. I met the guy who put up that rigging once at a sushi restaurant. His team rents the rigging, installs it, and takes it down, including putting up/down the lights, cameras, banners, anything on the rigging. It is custom made, in a sense, but think of it more like legos or tinker toys, where the components can be assembled in a custom manner to fit any given venue. It is not built from scratch for the Rio, just assembled in place to fit the Rio.

This was back when it was still all in the Amazon room. He mentioned they paid him 250K for it.

Wait. Do people really think the WSOP is going to run a full normal schedule this year? And that it will be as attended as it usually is? The main also? Ish don't think so

Back to normal in terms of schedule, not in terms of entrants.
A hell of a lot of recs won't have recovered enough financially by then to have the disposable cash and a lot of the super seniors are dead.

I think there is a very real possibility of it running in some fashion. I would assume it gets pushed back a little until late summer or early fall, but Venetian, Wynn, and Bally's are all currently having a tournament series. Many people traveled to Florida to play the series at the Seminole Hard Rock.

Numbers will be down, but it seems almost certain it will run in some fashion.

I hope they push it out to Fall. June would be cutting it close even for phase 1B people to have access to vaccines. I think I heard that the goal is to enable everyone to get vaccines by Fall (or maybe Winter).

Plus who wants to be in Vegas when it's 110-120 degrees everyday.

I don't know if this is something seriously worth considering, but are bitcoin crypto projections a factor into when they may be looking at running the WSOP this year?

I do.

I've seen zero people suggest this. Everyone's saying the opposite.

The end is near.

Yeah, in light of rapidly dropping case numbers and the new much higher vaccine projections pending J&J approval at the end of this month, it now sounds to me like things should be almost entirely back to normal by the end of April, at least in the US.

Obviously the vaccine progress has been much worse in most of the rest of the world, so it is possible we may have a WSOP that runs close to normal with respect to Americans but mostly excludes many other countries.

I'll take the over on this by 2-3 months at least. The rapidly dropping case numbers are promising, but they're still very high - over 3x what they were last summer. The recent news on vaccine rollout is also very promising, but we have several months at least until they're widely available, plus remember that most of the vaccines don't take full effect until about 1 month after first dose (first dose + 2-3 weeks for second dose + 2 weeks for maximum efficacy).

People are still crazy and don't wear masks...

Are you saying you think we have a WSOP that starts in 3.5 months even though it hasn't even been announced yet?

Optimistic much!!

I would be very surprised if things were almost entirely back to normal by the end of April 2022, you are dreaming if you think anything resembling 'normality' resumes in just a few weeks time? Things are improving, yes - but vaccines only make a difference when a large enough percentage of the population have had them. Vaccines are not a magic bullet, they are not 100% effective and we still do not know their effectiveness against some of the virus variants that already exist.

By the summer, things will have improved dramatically, especially across the majority of the richer, western countries - but the idea that 'normality' immediately returns is overly optimistic and quite simply, wrong.

They could run the WSOP in its usual May/June slot but they would be looking at about 30-35% of normal attendance at most. Push it to the fall and they could easily be looking at double that number. It's not hard to do the math as to which option makes the most sense financially, morally and responsibly

I might very well make sense for the WSOP to delay until the fall for the benefit of international players.

Big conventions and other mass attendance events that have to plan months in advance will be the last piece of society to come back. But in terms of day to day life (restaurants, regular social gatherings, schools, etc.), I do believe that things will be more or less back to normal in the US around the end of April.

We should be able to have around 150 million people vaccinated by then, and this would seem to be around the threshold necessary for herd immunity when you combine it with the ~30% of the population that has already been infected. Many places in the US are already pretty much back to normal right now!

With respect to the variants, there has been pretty convincing evidence that the mRNA vaccines are every bit as effective against the UK variant as the against the original strain. And there was just a paper published earlier this week in Nature (link below) finding that the Pfizer vaccine is almost as effective in producing antibodies at least against the South African strain as against other strains.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01270-4

This was adorable.

I find it incredible people are still this optimistic at this stage of this disaster. There's absolutely no way **** is normal by the end of April in the US and if anything, we will be the last ones back to normal. Have you not been paying attention for the past year-plus?

Anyways if you want to go the evidence-based route, like someone said, the schedule would usually be out for about a month by now. These things take time to plan, schedule, market etc. To echo what several others have said, I could see a WSOP happening this summer but it won't be near its normal proportion.

I have been told big Venetian series is happening, however, which makes me think WSOP is gonna do something. Seems hard to imagine they let V have all the rake for themselves.