WSOP
Before players even take their seats at the tables, major planning has been underway for months regarding the tournament structures, payouts, surveillance, the dealers (and their recruitment), cashiers, chips, cards, tables, felts, chairs, and much more. Every consideration is taken into account to make sure that the month-and-a-half long poker spectacle runs as smoothly as possible.
“There are literally thousands of different moving
parts that require a team to be constantly communicating and connecting with one another on a regular basis to ensure no detail has been overlooked and everything needed has been accounted for,” Palansky says.
Player input A major part of the WSOP’s planning focuses on
players and making it the best experience possible. That includes making use of player input to make the series better each year.
“It’s very simple. The players provide the best point
of view on what needs fine-tuning each year, and they are very helpful in providing suggestions, guidance and impactful changes,” Palansky says. “We always have players weigh in on things like structures, payouts, starting chip stacks, length of play each day, number and length of breaks, etc. So sometimes we are soliciting feedback, other times we are getting feedback through phone calls, emails, in-person meetings, Tweets, letters and real-event experiences.”
Palansky says that the WSOP staff can make use of
player advice no matter how an issue arises. WSOP officials say one of their hopes is that any change will serve as a better way to do something that is in the best interest of the majority of the stakeholders involved. Palansky credits player recommendations with some major improvements made in recent years.
“We’ll go about trying to implement it if it is
feasible,” he says of player input. “The World Series of Poker really owes a lot to the players for how the payouts and structures of our events are. They have been the ones to provide the necessary feedback to fine-tune them and help keep them the best in the business in terms of value.”
Beyond casual recommendations by way of Twitter, email, and conversations, the WSOP also fields a player advisory council, which is charged with making recommendations for the tournaments.
As for the style of tournaments, the WSOP also looks at popular formats and other ideas from players who may want to add in something new. For example, this year an “antes only” style event and a four- handed tournament were added to offer something new and different. However, Holdem remains the most popular game and the WSOP offers numerous tournaments to cater to that popularity.
In recent years, the series has scheduled several smaller buy-in tournaments (as low as $1,000 and satellites for only $100) to cater to weekend warrior poker players hoping to live the dream and win a big payday. The efforts have been rewarding. These events have created massive fields – a perfect fit for average players looking spend a couple days in Vegas with the chance to bring home some big money.
Getting the word out
As poker has grown since the amazing 2003 run of Chris Moneymaker, so have the number of fans who follow the game. This has created an avalanche of multimedia opportunities for fans to follow the action, and the WSOP is no exception. While online poker played a major role in creating a poker boom, Black Friday in the U.S. (when the federal government cracked down on the game) led to the cancellation of much poker programming. ESPN also decided to ditch much of the live poker programming that had proven so popular in 2011.
Faced with this, Caesars revamped
WSOP.com to
better serve poker fans. The site features news, online updates, chip counts, and photos of every tournament during the series. Twitter has also proven a popular tool in keeping up with the series. In 2012, longtime poker reporter Jessica Welman was added as managing editor of the World Series official website. While ESPN remains a key broadcasting partner, the WSOP made the decision to ramp up its online webcasts this year. Every final table was shown near- live, many with live commentary by longtime broadcaster David Tuchman, who was often joined by professional players providing insight.
“The multi-camera set up was a huge
improvement in my mind,” says Welman. “Many poker livestreams are limited by just an overhead shot and a flop cam, so to be able to come in for close ups, have cameras on the floor, and give the
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