The WSOP and the Poker Boom: From Binion’s to Billions

🕑 10 min read

Last updated: June 2026

It started as a handful of gamblers playing cards in the back of a downtown casino, decided by a show of hands. It became a billion-dollar global game watched by millions, where an accountant named Moneymaker turned thirty-nine dollars into two and a half million and changed everything. This is the story of the World Series of Poker and the boom it set off, from the cigar smoke at Binion’s to the screen in your pocket. I was around for the early days. Let me deal you in.

Poker is the one game in this whole world where the casino isn’t your enemy. You’re playing the other folks at the table, not the house, and skill genuinely decides who wins over time. That’s what makes its story so different, and so good. It’s a story about gamblers becoming legends, and then, almost by accident, about the door swinging open for everybody. Here’s how it happened.

A backroom at Binion’s

The whole thing began in 1970, in the back of Binion’s Horseshoe, a gambler’s casino in downtown Las Vegas run by a colorful old Texan named Benny Binion. Benny gathered a small group of the best poker players in America to play, and at the end they simply voted on who the best of them was. The winner of that first World Series of Poker was Johnny Moss, crowned not by chips but by a show of hands among his peers.

The next year they fixed that, turning it into a real tournament where you played until one person had all the chips, a format called a freezeout, and the modern World Series was born. For its first decade or so it stayed a small, smoky, insider affair, a few dozen grizzled professionals and road gamblers who all knew each other, playing for bracelets and bragging rights in a cramped downtown card room. There were no cameras, no crowds, no sponsorships. Just the best card players alive, settling who was king. I came up around downtown in those years, and let me tell you, that room had more nerve and history per square foot than anywhere in town.

The old gods of the game

That early era minted the legends the whole game still bows to. Johnny Moss, the grand old man, won that first title and two more. Doyle Brunson, the one they called Texas Dolly, won the Main Event back to back in 1976 and 1977, and famously closed out both years holding a ten and a deuce, a junk hand that’s been known as the Brunson ever since. He later wrote the book that taught a generation how to play, and stayed a beloved giant of the game until his death.

There was Amarillo Slim, the lanky hustler in the cowboy hat who won in 1972 and then did something nobody else thought to: he took poker onto television talk shows and made himself a star, planting the first seed of the game’s mainstream future. And towering over all of them in raw talent was Stu Ungar, the New York kid who won the Main Event three times, a story so remarkable it gets its own telling in our piece on the rise and fall of gambling’s greatest genius. These were the gods of poker’s quiet age. The world just didn’t know them yet.

The little camera that changed everything

For thirty years, poker had a problem as a spectator sport: it was boring to watch. You couldn’t see the players’ cards, so on television it was just people in sunglasses pushing chips while you had no idea what was going on. Then came a small invention that changed the game forever, the hole-card camera, a tiny lens set into the table rail that let viewers at home see each player’s secret cards.

Suddenly everything was different. Now you could see the bluff as it happened, watch a man bet big with nothing while his opponent agonized over a real hand, and feel the drama you’d been missing for decades. Poker on TV went from dull to unbearably tense overnight. A British show pioneered the idea, then American television ran with it, and by the early 2000s, glossy poker coverage with the hole cards showing was finding real audiences. The stage was set. All it needed was the right hero to walk on, and in 2003, he did, and his name was almost too perfect to be true.

The Moneymaker effect

In 2003, an amateur accountant from Tennessee with the unbelievable real name of Chris Moneymaker paid about thirty-nine dollars to enter a small online tournament on a poker website. He won it, and the prize was a seat in the World Series of Poker Main Event, the ten-thousand-dollar championship in Las Vegas. He had never played a live tournament in his life.

He won the whole thing. An unknown everyman, who’d qualified online for the price of a dinner, beat the toughest professionals on earth and walked away with two and a half million dollars, all of it broadcast on television with the hole cards showing so America could watch every bluff. The message that went out to every person watching at home was electric and irresistible: that could be me. A regular guy, on a computer, for thirty-nine bucks. They even had a name for what followed, the Moneymaker effect, and it remade the entire game. It remains, dollar for dollar and pound for pound, one of the most consequential wins in the history of gambling.

The boom and the billion-dollar game

What happened next was a genuine explosion. The year Moneymaker won, a few hundred players entered the Main Event. The very next year the field more than tripled, and within three years it had grown to nearly nine thousand, each of them dreaming the same dream. Online poker sites that let anyone play and qualify for pennies grew into giants overnight, and a whole generation learned the game on screens, grinding thousands of hands a day that the old road gamblers couldn’t have played in a year. These days that casual crowd has drifted to instant crash games like Aviator, which now dwarf online poker.

Poker became a real career, a televised sport, and a billion-dollar industry, seemingly all at once. The boom had its hard landing too. In 2011, on a day the poker world still calls Black Friday, the United States government shut the biggest online sites out of the American market, freezing players’ money and cooling the frenzy hard. But the genie was long out of the bottle. Poker had gone from a smoky backroom secret to a game millions of people around the world play, study, and love. One online satellite and one perfectly named accountant did that.

Where the dream stands now

Today the World Series of Poker is bigger than its founders could ever have imagined, drawing enormous fields from every corner of the globe, with the Main Event still the most coveted title in the game and record numbers of players chasing it. A gold bracelet remains the thing every serious player wants more than money. The modern professionals are sharper than any generation before them, schooled in mathematics and software the old gods never dreamed of.

And yet the heart of it hasn’t changed at all. Every year, some unknown qualifier who got in cheap online runs deep against the legends, and the whole room remembers Moneymaker and believes again. That’s the magic of poker, and why it outlasted the boom and the bust. It’s the one game on the casino floor where you, with skill and nerve and a little luck, can genuinely beat the best in the world, starting from almost nothing. The backroom at Binion’s grew into a global stage, but the dream it sells is the same one Benny Binion’s players felt in 1970. Sit down, play your cards right, and anyone can become king.

Frequently asked questions

When did the World Series of Poker start?

It began in 1970 at Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, organized by casino owner Benny Binion. The first champion, Johnny Moss, was chosen by a vote of his fellow players. The following year it became a proper freezeout tournament, the format it still uses today.

What was the Moneymaker effect?

It’s the poker boom set off when amateur Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series Main Event for 2.5 million dollars after qualifying through a roughly thirty-nine dollar online satellite. Televised with the hole cards showing, his win convinced millions of ordinary people they could do the same, and tournament fields exploded.

Why did the hole-card camera matter so much?

Before it, viewers couldn’t see players’ cards, so poker was dull to watch. The tiny rail-mounted camera let audiences see each hand, turning bluffs and big calls into gripping drama. It transformed poker into a watchable spectator sport and made the television boom of the early 2000s possible.

Who is the greatest WSOP player ever?

It’s hotly debated, but Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar are the two names mentioned most. Brunson won back-to-back Main Events and wrote the game’s defining strategy book, while Ungar won the Main Event three times on pure talent. Many modern pros have racked up more bracelets, but those two define the legend.

Can an amateur still win the World Series of Poker?

Yes, and it’s part of what keeps the dream alive. The Main Event draws huge fields, and unknown players who qualified cheaply online regularly run deep against the professionals. Poker rewards skill over time, but in a single tournament, nerve and luck can carry anyone to the title, just as they did for Chris Moneymaker.

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