Since I have no questions to answer for this post, I asked ChatGPT the following questions off the top of my head consecutively:

1. When did the World Series of Poker Main Event first top 50 players?
2. Who was the first woman to win a World Series of Poker bracelet?
3. Who was the first woman to cash in a World Series of Poker event?

and it got all three answers wrong. Worse, it admitted it actually knew the correct answers when prodded.



I promise I'll give you more accurate answers than ChatGPT and its ilk (but hopefully for harder questions than these).

in super/system brunson said a huge fish nearly won the wsop in the early years because everyone kept trying to bluff him, who was that fish?

If he was talking about 1977, I'd guess amateur Milo Jacobson (who finished third for $0, although wsop.com oddly has him second).

seems about right. they all made deals at the end then. i wonder if the winner gave him a "pity" deal because he lost so much in the cash games.

When did WSOP chips stop having a cash value? I recall a story about Doyle cashing out to avoid winning and making the news, in the 1972 WSOP, IIRC.

What were dealer downs like from 2000 to 2005-ish?

Lots of things were different in the early years, but that was a truly unusual 3-way deal that was made to allow Brunson to feign illness and "cash out" for $20,000. The deal worked out well for everyone, however, as Amarillo Slim Preston was the best poker ambassador you could ask for. He made numerous television appearances that greatly popularized the WSOP.

WSOP tournament chips (and tournament chips in general) never have cash value otherwise.

Sorry, I don't know what you're specifically looking for, but that's not my area of expertise anyway, so hopefully someone else can chime in.

Most of that was during the infamously cheap Becky Binion era, however, so I'm sure the dealers were especially overworked and underpaid!

I used to subscribe to a weekly email from somebody. This person used an alias so it was not his real name. He also brought out a book.

It was in sections like how to play heads up and had a home game feel to it. It was around 2003 ish.


Its annoying me that i cannot remember his name.

I found it… roy rounder.

do you think the moneymaker effect is exaggerated?

i'm of the opinion that it was already taking off anyway - i could be mistaken, but everyone i knew had seen rounders, and this made everyone interested in poker and then boom, suddenly for the first time ever there's now poker on tv as well

It was a confluence of events, and there's no way to tell how much each contributed. In alphabetical order:

• Chris Moneymaker: Everyman, down-to-earth, likeable, and that too-good-to-be-true name. Bonus points for misremembering his initial satellite buyin as $39, since that sounded a lot better than the actual $86.
• ESPN Broadcasts: ESPN made a great call replaying the seven 2003 Main Event episodes repeatedly, exposing countless viewers to the Cinderella Story that they might have missed the first umpteen times it aired.
• Hole Card Cam: Viewers love feeling smarter than the players on TV. The subconscious impulse for them to think more highly of their own poker skills because of this can't be overstated.
• Internet Poker: The convenience of playing from home is extraordinary. Play whenever you want for however long you want without even having to get dressed. Much lower buyins too.
• Rounders: When the Matt Damon/Edward Norton movie hit theaters in 1998, it didn't do that well at the box office ($8.5 million opening weekend and $22.9 million total in the U.S.). However, it became a cult classic after its February 9, 1999 DVD release.
• World Poker Tour: WPT guys like Mike Sexton swear they were the main cause of the poker boom. They started airing on the Travel Channel on March 30, 2003, seven weeks before the WSOP Main Event hit ESPN (May 19).
• World Series of Poker Growth: The WSOP had already been growing fairly consistently since its inception. The Main Event jumped from 631 players to 839 in 2003 (pre-Moneymaker boost).

I think 2+2 posters downplay Moneymaker's role a bit too much as a reasonable reaction to the overly hyped "Moneymaker Effect". The reality is somewhere in between. The boom was going to happen no matter what, but Moneymaker made it bigger faster.

thanks

do you have this info as a fan who took it upon themselves to be a historian or are/were you involved with the wsop and saw how the sausage was made from the inside (or were you playing in all the old ones, if so are you a player who we may recognize?)



what about the televized poker where people playing an event that only existed for the tv production (ie not wpt or wsop which was happening anyway without the tv cameras on)

i know you only talked about wsop but i'm assuming you may have some insights into that as well?

• how were players chosen?
• what kind of backroom dealings were going on? ie if you had the "star" could they influence the lineup
• was production in on it in the sense where they knew certain players like elezra and farha were the spots the game ran around but didn't want to insult them and drive them away so they flattered them and pretended they too were skilled pros like how hcl happily pretends that keating and airball are professionals and crushers or did they honestly think that everyone at the table was really good?
• were the amounts of money real or for tv? ie looking at some tv lineups, it's hard to believe anyone would play given they could play much softer games off camera, so were the buyins paid by their sponsors if they were real dollar amounts?

also are there any questions you wish people had asked but hadn't?

The former. I developed a No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em app, started blogging in 2013 as a marketing tool, and soon found myself drawn in by the articles I was writing about the WSOP. When my game was kicked out of the App Store (through no fault of my own), I turned to WSOP research, analysis, and writing full time. It was originally only an app (released in 2019 to coincide with the 50th WSOP), but since it was mostly graphics and HTML, I also made a web site after getting yet another App Store rejection (for an ad-sponsored version that I'm sure I could have gotten approved eventually but was too ticked off to try).

Sorry, I have no insider knowledge.

I did originally blog about a variety of poker topics including the WPT, old festivals (Super Bowl of Poker, Aussie Millions, Irish Open, etc.), and strategy, but that was a decade ago now, and I haven't updated any of that info. Sorry, no insights there.


I'm already posting in other threads. Here, I just wish people would ask more questions, period, but maybe you're right that people don't even know what to ask.

I've gone through the entire Benny Binion Collection at UNLV's Lied Library, watched literally every video and read every book, magazine, newspaper, and web article I could find on the WSOP and taken thousands of pages of notes. I have hundreds of spreadsheets that I'm in the process of converting into databases so I can query things more efficiently.

Please ask me about players (famous or obscure), WSOP tournaments (by year, game type, buyin, etc.) or records (first, most, youngest, oldest, etc.) or women at the WSOP (or even men in the Ladies Championship ;-). I'd like to serve as a useful resource to the community, so ask me anything...

i mean, the extent of my wsop knowledge starts with johnny chan (and only due to rounders) and only things i know before that are stu ungar and whatever random anecdote doyle brunson included in super system

and i think i probably know more than most, and even then don't even know enough to know what to ask


what are your thoughts on early wsops, with such small fields was it just pros looking for bragging rights or were there still some marks in there which the games ran around?


who would you say is the most accomplished player who most people had never heard of before

who would you say is the most overrated player


any good/funny stories?


what about stu ungar cheating allegations? or other cheating allegations i may have not heard of?


you may be interested in this thread -
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...ight=stu+ungar

here's the article they are discussing
https://web.archive.org/web/20140125...gar-11293.html

my takeaway is that while stu is without a doubt way ahead of his peers, his entire game is predicated on the lack of cbet bluffs and check raises in the game where he's able to very profitably play any speculative hands while in position where when they cbet to him he can overfold and when they check he can either choose between getting a free card or bluffing them off their hand since by checking they basically told him "i didn't hit that flop"

i mean since that strat was clearly not obvious to everyone then it's worth giving him credit for being the only one to figure that out, but at the same time it's kind of sad to learn it was that easy then - it's the difference between learning "babe ruth faced sem-professionals who worked jobs in the offseason instead of training and threw him mid 80s fastballs vs learning that babe ruth was actually hitting slow pitch underhand balls

The cash games drew a lot of the top players (and sometimes they missed tournaments because of the action). But Benny Binion also treated them very well, including excellent free food, to make the whole experience enjoyable.


It was just mentioned in another thread how underrated Sklansky is. But going further back, quite a few great players didn't win much money because of the winner-take-all structure.

Crandell Addington had seven unpaid WSOP Main Event Top Ten finishes: 1972 6th, 1973 9th, 1974 2nd, 1975 3rd, 1976 4th, 1979 7th, & 1983 10th.

Jesse Alto is also underappreciated despite his numerous deep Main Event runs.


This is a pretty unanswerable question without more data. For the most part, we only know about tournaments that players cashed in. We need all the entry data too. The WSOP knows, but it's not in their best interest to share the info, so we'll never know.

I won't call out anyone specifically, but a general answer is every Main Event champion who did nothing else poker-related. They're famous for being world champions, and they certainly exhibited more skill than any lottery winner, but probably have a remarkable run of luck to thank for their good fortune.


I'm more of a numbers guy than a story guy. Almost every story I know, I heard from a book or article anyway.

My best original story so far has been debunking the chip and a chair myth in my Top 10 Tuesday thread. Because anything that involves Hustler magazine is more interesting than 99% of what I write.


Excellent analysis by Clayton (I'd already seen the Conjelco reports, of course)! Compared to the average 2+2'er, I'm far below average on the skills side of things (won a little at very low stakes online pre-Black Friday and am roughly breakeven at the WSOP Seniors recently), so I'll leave the analysis to others.

But I can conclude from the article that Ungar played very well (okay, his opponents played pretty badly too) and had no need to cheat. There's already a perfectly reasonable explanation for his glasses (to hide his caved in nose). And of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, of which nobody has any.

how did u come to this

loose money and free credit everywhere in one of the biggest real estate and market bubbles the world had ever seen.

I know there is this one famous hand of the ME where Sam Farha busts an amateur when both flop a boat in the first hand.
Are there other famous instances and known hands where a player busts the Main in the first hand?

That's the most famous instance since it happened at the TV table in 2005 and the victim was Oliver Hudson (Goldie Hawn's son and Kate Hudson's brother).

A couple players exited on Hand 1 in 2023 (Mikolaj Zawadzki [set under set] and an anonymous player [Kings vs. Aces], both Day 1D) and 2024 (Craig Issod [set chased down by straight draw] and Travis "T.J." Darroch [set of Tens filling up on turn card that gave opponent quad Eights], both Day 1A).