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While down a bit from last year, the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event is officially the third largest ever. The entire 2011 WSOP (combined events) has broken the record for largest attendance.
The 6865 registrants is down from last year’s 7319. Many experts believed that the poor economy and legal disruptions within the online poker community were likely to have resulted in a drastic decline. On April 15, the US Justice Department indicted and fined three of the biggest US-facing Internet card rooms – PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, charging them with money laundering and bank fraud.
With $64.5 million in total prize money to be rewarded, the winner will walk away with $8.77 million.
"We've met our own expectations and crushed everybody else's," says Ty Stewart, executive director of the WSOP. "So I think it's been an expose on just how global poker has become. We're very proud because people have been labeling poker or the World Series of Poker as a fad … for the better part of a decade now. And we continue year after year to set records and see the event get bigger and bigger and represented by more countries around the world."
- Ace King, Gambling911.com
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