If you were to ask any poker player on April 16, 2011 to guess what kind of impact Black Friday was going to have on the World Series of Poker I can all but guarantee not one of them would have said “the 2011 WSOP will break the record for overall attendance and the record for the largest total prize-pool… And the Main Event will be the third largest in history.”

Nobody may have been thinking that in April, but this is precisely what took place at the 2011 WSOP tournament series. With the Main Event in full swing, the complete numbers are in for the 2011 WSOP, and considering the circumstances taking place in the online poker world these numbers are made all the more impressive:

The 2011 World Series of Poker total prize-money awarded = $191,999,010

The near $192 million in prize-money awarded throughout the WSOP makes this far and away the richest prize in sports –if you lump poker in with other sports. Overall, this was a 2.6% increase over the record set last year.

The 2011 World Series of Poker total attendance = 75,672 entrants

With Black Friday looming over the WSOP the tournament series still managed to best last year’s attendance total by 3.7%, and even though the attendance grew at a slightly higher rate than the prize-money –which means the average buy-in was a bit smaller—this is still an incredibly impressive feat.

Statistics courtesy of wsop.com

Tags: 192, Attendance, Black Friday, Break, Circumstances, Full Swing, Impressive Feat, main event, Online Poker, Other Sports, Poker Player, Poker World, Pool Records, prize money, Prize Pool, Series Of Poker, Statistics, world series, World Series of Poker, WSOP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 8:04 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.