The WSOP unofficially starts at 9am today as the Amazon Room at the Rio opens for registration, cash games and satellites before the tournaments begin Wednesday with Event #1, the $500 Casino Employees tournament. That\’s as good a reason as any to do the preview for this year\’s World Series of Poker, so here\’s some things to look out for during the Series:
1. How much the world economy affects the poker economy. Big buy-in tournaments in the US have fallen by double digits, while season 5 of the European Poker Tour has experienced large fields and prize pools. The $40,000 40th anniversary WSOP tournament is event #2 on the schedule, which some believe is the best way to decimate field size as ~90% of the field will be out $40,000. This is also the first tournament where people are making over/under bets on the size of the field. The extremely useful WSOP Staff Resource Guide expects a field of 150, while many are expecting somewhere between 200-250. For those with much smaller bankrolls, Saturday\’s $1,000 \”Stimulus Special\” starts with a field of over 5,000 over two day 1\’s playing down to a winner on Tuesday. Another change that will help the players\’ rolls is the elimination of rebuy tournaments this year. Why this was done depends on who you talk to (prevents people from buying a bracelet, more fair to players who don\’t have deep pockets, preventing tournament staff from taking rebuy money, etc)
2. More tournaments! More chips! More levels! More Pros win!? The 2009 WSOP will have plenty of opportunity for players to win bracelets, with 57 bracelets up for grabs in Vegas (up from 55). It has also been called the year of value by tournament staff; giving its players triple the buy-in starting chips, and adding levels to several tournaments. Last year several well known players won their first bracelets (Nenad Medic, Erick Lindgren, Kenny Tran, Dario Minieri and John Phan among them), so it\’s expected that players such as Patrik Antonius, Gavin Smith, Tom Dwan and Andy Bloch could take down some fine gold jewelry of their own.
3. A kindler, gentler WSOP? Last year\’s antics by Scotty Nguyen and Phil Hellmuth, and the lack of enforcement of the rules against them, caused much controversy. Part of this year\’s staff this past weekend included something called \”Handling Challenging Situations\” so the hope is they\’ll be better suited to handle any problems over the next 7+ weeks. This year\’s WSOP has also put their Code of Conduct directly into the tournament rules along with promises of a written log of all penalties and warnings and more even enforcement of the rules. The rules on profanity have been changed yet again, this time all profanity is not allowed in the poker room. It\’ll be interesting to see how stringent this particular rule gets enforced.
4. Will Twitter rule over the WSOP? Twitter has really exploded over the past few months, while some were all over Twitter last year, it took a while for the rest of us to get into the game.
That\’s plenty of preview from me, so be sure to make Pokerati one of your places to go to follow during the WSOP. Dan, California Jen and the rest of Team Pokerati will be sure to have all sorts of good stuff to write about while at the Rio, while I\’ll be hopefully be writing from a remote location each morning and afternoon with a review and preview of each day\’s action.