Changes to 2010 World Series of Poker

Changes to 2010 World Series of Poker

Thursday, 3 September 2009

It’s looks unlikely that the $40,000 No Limit Hold’em Championship will be returning to the 2010 World Series Of Poker. The event made its debut earlier this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the World Series and attracted a field of 201 runners who were competing for a first prize of $1.9m.

Despite its popularity with many professionals, organisers feared that it could overshadow the $10,000 Main Event. The growth of the $40,000 event could mean one tournament for the pros and another for amateurs, a situation the WSOP wished to avoid.


There will be far more $1,000 events, likely a reaction to the diminishing disposable incomes of the average US citizen. According to WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky, the success of the $1,000 Hold ‘em event last year – selling out two opening days for a field of over 6,000 – means that the organisers are planning to add as many as six $1k events to the program.


In addition, they will aim to make the overall series bigger. Bigger is better, especially considering the events that sold out last year included Day 1d of the $10,000 Main Event – even Full Tilt Poker pro Patrik Antonius was left without a seat.


Another step that the WSOP will take to combat this is perhaps pre-registering players to assigned days. However, this is not confirmed. Palansky stressed that the WSOP’s intention was absolutely not to sell out events.


“We feel like we can get the schedule out sooner, because there’s less of an overhaul to do,” said Palansky. “We can pretty much run with what we did last year, perhaps taking out some events that didn’t have such a good attendance and adjusting the buy-ins on some others.”


The $50k Champions Invitational also looks set to be scrapped, until another major anniversary at least. The larger stack sizes and absence of re-buy events looks set to continue next year too.



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