The World Series of Poker, explained

It began in May 1970 at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, where owner Benny Binion hosted a small group of players for about a week and a half of cash games. There wasn't a tournament that year. The players voted for the best all-around player, and Johnny Moss got the title and a silver cup.

A year later the title was settled at the table. Six players put up $5,000 each in a freezeout, a tournament with one entry each, and Moss beat Walter "Puggy" Pearson one on one at the end for $30,000. The buy-in rose to $10,000 in 1972, and it has stayed there ever since.

For three decades it grew slowly, reaching 839 players by 2003. That year Chris Moneymaker, an accountant, won a seat through an $86 online satellite and turned it into $2.5 million. The field went to 2,576 the next year, 5,619 the year after and 8,773 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won $12 million.

The press called that jump the Moneymaker effect. The record now is 10,112, set in 2024, and the 2026 field of 9,208 was the fourth largest of all time.

Everyone pays $10,000, and in 2026 $9,300 of that went into the prize pool. You start with 60,000 chips and play no-limit hold'em. In 2026 there were four starting days to choose from, each made up of five two-hour levels with breaks, and the survivors merged into later days. Late registration ran through Day 2D on July 7, so players had until then to sit down.

It's a freezeout, so you get one entry and you're done when your chips are gone. The field shrinks day by day to the last nine players, who play the final table.

In 2026 they came back in August, and Jumalon, a 22-year-old from Spokane, Washington, won $10 million and the gold bracelet that every WSOP event winner gets.

Pay the $10,000, or win a seat in a satellite, a cheaper tournament whose prize is an entry into the main event. At the 2026 series, live satellites ran at $585, $1,100 and $2,200, with $150 and $260 step events that fed into the bigger ones. Some online sites run them too, in places where they're legal.

You have to be 21 to play in Nevada. Amateurs have won from a satellite: Jerry Yang won a seat in a $225 satellite at a California casino and took the 2007 title and $8.25 million. Those are the famous cases, though. The math below shows what a satellite costs on average.

Using the 2026 numbers, 1,383 of 9,208 players were paid, so an average entrant had a 15% chance of getting anything back, which is about 1 in 7. The chance of winning the whole thing was 1 in 9,208.

Getting paid can still mean a small win. The prize pool divided by the 1,383 paid players is about $61,900, but the top prizes pull that average up and most prizes are far smaller.

A good player will beat those odds, but the field is huge and the swings are big. Nobody should plan around winning it. Treat a $10,000 entry as a very expensive and very memorable day out.

Harrah's bought Binion's Horseshoe in 2004, kept the WSOP brand and moved the series to the Rio in 2005. Since 2022 it has been played on the Strip, at Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas.

In 2024 Caesars sold the WSOP brand for $500 million to NSUS Group, and kept the right to host the Las Vegas series for 20 years.