The entrants in the World Poker Tournament have decreased this year, around 25% smaller than last year. But the WSOP tournaments says a bit different with 3 out 9 events sold out at present. It only means that people are interested to enter but oddly no more rooms to crammed them in.

Looking for evidence? Let’s check the WSOP statistics from 2003 till the previous year. Year 2003 mark the win of Moneymaker and the WSOP only had 839 players. In 2004, the number of players have gone to 2,576, about three times more than the previous year. And then the jump to 5,619 in 2005 and 8,773 in 2006. WSOP series in 2007 and 2008 got 6,358 and 6,844 players respectively.

The decrease of numbers since 2006 can be charged into the passage of the UIGEA bill in Congress in which a number of poker sites withdraw from the US market. Due to their departure, a lot people withdraw from playing online and also there is a decrease of online satellite opportunities for poker players who wanted to join the major tournaments.

Though the government really tried to pursue closing down all poker sites online, just check out the statistics. More than 6000 players since the year after the UIGEA was passed signifies that a lot of people wanted to play online poker!

The huge success of the $1,000 NLHE tournament shows how much people wanted to play poker. This Stimulus Specias as called by the WSOP brass attracted more than 6,000 players during its course. Professional poker player Steve Sung grabbed the bracelet despite of the astonishing number of players involve.

It will be hard to say if the players this year can reach 6,000 because of all the hinders such as the recession, swine flu and more UIGEA forces. But as the number in the preliminaries are big, maybe the Main event this present year will turnout to be one of the largest so far.

If everything turn out right this year and there would be an influx of entrants then it will be another sign for the government to legislate and legalize poker in the Internet. Well, let’s just pray that the government will repel the UIGEA and then think of more creative ways to play poker online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 2:25 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.