We’re safely tucked away at an airport hotel in Heathrow, waiting to make the hop over tomorrow to Vegas. Which is pretty damn exciting to type, as it’s snuck up on us a bit with all the other work going on as far as losing sight of the fact that it’s tomorrow as far as wheels down. Vegas!
We’re still noodling around with our hand-crafted database of results from 930 WSOP open bracelet events from 1970-2011, with a few longer-term projects in mind but it’s also fun to poke around and pull up some assorted randomness.
As far as the headline stats, we’ve already talked about the $1.4 billion in total prize money awarded, but a few of the other big headline stats are kind of cool as well.
That money was generated by 493,344 total entries across all events we have results for, which equates to the entire country of Luxembourg hitting up the WSOP.
The winners of those events scooped up a hefty $320 million, which is a little more than the GDP of the country of São Tomé and Príncipe and a little less than Tonga’s GDP.
225 players have more than $1 million in lifetime WSOP earnings, with just 31 of those being a WSOP millionaire on the back of winning a single event.
Doyle casts a very long shadow over the entire history of the WSOP
As far as getting max value from your single bracelet win, Jamie Gold is hard to top with $12 million for his one and only bracelet in the 2006 Main Event. On the flip side of the coin is Starla Brodie, who was Doyle Brunson’s partner in the 1979 Mixed Doubles event, winning $4,500 for her one and only WSOP victory.
If you look at average prize money per bracelet for those with 5 or more bracelets, it’s actually Scotty Nguyen that has maxed out the value of his five bracelets won, winning $706,426 per bracelet; Hellmuth has far more bracelets with 11 but only averaged $344,302 per bracelet, with his total bracelet victories worth $3.78 million versus Nguyen’s $3.53 million.
On the other end of that spectrum is Gary “Bones” Berland, who won five bracelets from 1977-1979 but only earned a total of $87,000 from those victories, for an average of $17,400 per bracelet win.
