While the vast majority of the very best players in the game may be in the under 30 demographic, yesterday’s $1,000 Senior’s Tournament (Open to players aged 50 and older) showed that poker is still and always will be a very popular pastime amongst middle-aged and retired people.

An amazing 4,128 players registered for the tournament yesterday, making the 2012 running not only the largest Senior’s Event in WSOP history, but also setting the record for the largest single-day field in WSOP history. Yes, that’s right, yesterday’s Senior’s Tournament was the biggest field to ever take their seats in a WSOP tournament; larger than any $1k NLHE event and larger than any WSOP Main Event starting day!

“This event showcases the beauty of poker, that it’s truly a game for life,” said World Series of Poker Executive Director Ty Stewart. “It was the most electric atmosphere we’ve had yet. Today’s record field bodes well for the rest of the summer.”

The Senior’s Tournament has a different feel to it than many of the other WSOP events, as the crowd tends to e a bit more talkative, showcasing what poker used to be like before players all wore headphones, texted, and used their iPads at the tables. While still competitive and cutthroat (it’s poker after all) the event simply has a completely different vibe to it, as players interact with one another. If I was marketing poker or the WSOP this is the event I would want people to watch.

With the record-setting number of entrants the Senior’s Tournament will be handing out one of the largest first-place prize of the 2012 WSOP thus far, with $603,713 of the $3.7 million prize-pool set aside for the winner.

There was some speculation that younger players were going to try to enter the event (much like men entering the Ladies Tournament) citing “Ageism”. Apparently some younger players see the Senior’s Event as a soft field, and on the WSOP Live Stream Chance Kornuth claimed his brother was already registered and that Chance was pushing the players he backs to enter the event as well –to his credit, David Tuckman gave him a good piece of his mind as to what he thought about this idea.

The tournament ended on Friday night with 462 players still in the hunt for the title (39 players away from the money) including some big names near the top of the leader-board: Humberto Brenes, Hal Lubarsky, Marcel Luske, Pete Giordano, Toto Leonidas, and Dennis Phillips all landed in the Top 10 chip-counts.

Tags: Brother, Crowd, Electric Atmosphere, Executive Director, Headphones, Ipads, Live Stream, Pastime, Prize Pool, Seniors, Series Of Poker, Showcases, Single Day, Speculation, Texted, Ty, Vibe, world series, World Series of Poker, WSOP Main Event

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2012 at 10:42 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.