2016 WSOP One For The Record Books

2015 marked the first year in which more than 100,000 people took part in the annual live poker festival known as the World Series of Poker. In 2016, however, attendance was up by 4.2% to 107,833 players, thus representing a new record high for the number of entrants attending the world’s most prestigious poker series.
Another impressive statistic coming from the WSOP in Las Vegas is that each of its 69 tournaments had an average attendance of 1,563 players, representing another record in the WSOP’s 47-year history. Furthermore, the 15,767 poker players who managed to cash in at the various competitions was also a historic high, with the numbers helped along by revamped preferential payout structures, as well as the increasing popularity of each event.
This year also proved the continuing global popularity of tournament poker, with players descending upon Nevada from 107 countries across the world. Naturally, the WSOP’s host country attracted far more players than anywhere else, with 84,027 Americans descending upon Nevada, but other nations also fielded impressive numbers of entries, including Canada (4,586), UK (4,388), France (1,293), Russia (1,280), Germany (1,169), and Brazil (970).
Of course, the Main Event is always the highlight of the annual WSOP, and this year the 6,737 players who competed in the tournament was the 5th biggest in its history, while the 4,240 who entered on Day 1c was the Main Event’s biggest ever single-day field.
One room for improvement, however, is the large discrepancy between the numbers of women and men participating in the series, with the 5,522 women who took part representing just 5.12% of overall entries. Nevertheless, two women managed to capture bracelets in open tournaments, including Canada’s Kristen Bicknell who won Event #46: $1,500 No Limit Hold’em Bounty for $290,768, and Russian pro Safiya Umerova who won Event #50: $1,500 No Limit Hold’em Shootout for $264,046. As Safiya Umerova commented after her victory:
“I think women poker players are underestimated. It happens to me, all the time when I was at the table. They would underestimate my thinking and my game, overall. I studied the game almost every day. I read a lot of books. I had people help me. I worked very much on my game to get here. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t work hard on my game.”