Poker's Second Boom? The WSOP Is Betting It Can Recapture Prime Time

^{Gregory Chochon, Chief Operating Officer of the World Series of Poker, has been with the organization for 12 years and has overseen its growth to more than 10,000 Main Event entrants today. (Photo: courtesy of WSOP)}

LAS VEGAS – Gregory Chochon cuts an imposing figure. As I walked up to meet him last week in the vast Paris Ballroom with cathedral ceilings and ornate fixtures, the WSOP's Chief Operating Officer stood tall in his immaculately tailored dark suit. He looked every bit the part of a man preparing to take on the largest poker tournament series of the summer.

That day, news broke that the WSOP and Warner Bros. Discovery had agreed to a new three-year partnership, including six 45-minute broadcast programs during the Main Event, airing on Eurosport and TNT Sports, with episodes available on demand via HBO Max in Europe. 

“Content,” Chochon would say more than once as we walked and talked. "It's all about content.”

The shows this year will be produced by Omaha Productions, a media company co-founded by NFL and now broadcast legends Peyton and Eli Manning.  

"It's exciting for us," Chochon said. "It's a big, big deal."

For the past five years, the World Series of Poker has been playing to its own crowd. Now, under new ownership and armed with landmark deals – ESPN's return, the Warner Bros. Discovery partnership in Europe – Chochon and the team at WSOP are executing an ambitious rebranding effort to turn poker from a gambling spectacle into a mainstream sport.

Chochon has been with the WSOP for 12 years, with the past two as Chief Operating Officer after NSUS Group acquired the series from Caesars for $500 million in 2024. NSUS developed and operates GGPoker, known as "The World's Biggest Poker Room." Last year, Caesars began a new deal that gave them the right to host the WSOP through 2045.

"Our new owner has been pretty clear. The goal is to grow the game,” Chochon explained. “And to grow the game, you need to consider the WSOP as a brand, as a sport, and not as gambling anymore.”

A part of the small but growing team includes Ty Stewart, Executive Director for the WSOP and Senior Vice President of Caesars Entertainment Interactive. Stewart’s been a venerated figure with the WSOP for over 20 years. 

Spunky Hwang joined the WSOP broadcasting and creative team after helming the wildly successful reality show Game of Gold, produced by GGPoker. It featured poker players such as Maria Ho, Jason Koon, and Fedor Holz.

Chochon, 44, graduated from the Université Paris Nanterre and joined the WSOP after a role as Head of Poker for BarrierePoker.fr in France. While at Barrière he was responsible for organizing tournaments and was instrumental in WSOP and Barrière's partnership, including running three WSOP Europe events in France. 

When Chochon joined the WSOP as director in 2014, the Main Event had 6,683 entrants. By 2019, that number had grown to 8,569. Five years after that, it had swelled even further to 10,112.

Bigger Than the Sport

As we walked and talked, Chochon expanded on the WSOP’s long-term growth vision. 

Chochon wants the WSOP to emulate the UFC, a mixed martial arts juggernaut that blew up around the same time poker did in the early 2000s. 

“UFC made their brand bigger than the sport,” Chochon said. “That’s what we’re trying to do. We want WSOP to be considered part of the sport’s brand, and not as a poker brand.” The WSOP, as a brand, would eclipse any single tournament within it.

"Look at what LIV is doing in golf,” he said of the PGA challenger that effectively failed despite nearly $5 billion invested. “They [put so much] money into it. But you can't create legacy. And that's what we have versus anyone else, from 1970 until now." 

Hundreds of players fill the room at Horseshoe Las Vegas during the 2026 WSOP, a far cry from the mere seven players who voted on a winner at Binion's Horseshoe in 1970. (Photo: Christina Bradfield / Casinos.com)

That poker legacy traces back to a single table at Benny Binion's Horseshoe on Fremont Street, where seven invited players voted on who among them was the best. Johnny Moss won. That was 1970.

The Series hit its real turning point in 2003, when an accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker turned an $86 online satellite into a $2.5 million Main Event championship. ESPN was airing the event with hole-card cameras for the first time, making him a star. 

With that, the first poker boom was on. The field nearly tripled the following year. By 2006, 8,773 players filled the Main Event, and the winner took home $12 million. Then, thanks to a federal law that chilled online poker and a DOJ crackdown on the largest online poker sites, fields began to level in the years that followed, and the WSOP eventually left ESPN for CBS Sports in 2021.

Now, 56 years after that first seven-player vote, we were walking toward the newly built main stage in the Paris ballroom.

The Main Stage of the WSOP at Paris Las Vegas, where the Main Event goes down. (Photo: Christina Bradfield / Casinos.com)

The area is large, impressive, and holds five feature tables, including one being livestreamed on the Hustler Casino channel, and a smaller raised stage for a new pre-game show, WSOP Countdown, led by Jeff Platt, Joe Stapleton and Norman Chad (arguably one of poker’s most famous faces).

"If anything is happening on one of those tables, we shoot it, and then we add it to the feed," Chochon said. 

Along the way, we passed Daniel Negreanu, one of poker's most successful and iconic pros and participant on Game of Gold, sitting at another table being interviewed. The surrounding stage area was red and black. It felt like a Red Bull campaign come to life in all the best ways. I can’t remember the last time I called a stage beautiful more than once before today. (It ended up being four times. I counted.)

The new Solana-branded felt at the 2026 WSOP. This year is the first time players can buy into WSOP events with Solana’s cryptocurrency SOL. (Photo: Christina Bradfield / Casinos.com)

Those colors would change a few days later to purple and white with sprinkles of red, presumably to accommodate new felts featuring the newest table sponsor, Solana, a crypto platform provider. This partnership is significant because it means players can buy into WSOP events with cryptocurrency for the first time. At WSOP Paradise in December, winners will be able to receive payouts in stablecoins.

These are just some of the changes the WSOP has helped bring to the Series this year.

When the World Shows Up

This year, the Main Event starts on July 2. But part of the spectacle doesn't truly arrive until thousands of players have already been eliminated and real money is on the line. 

That's when friends, family, and other spectators flood in with flags representing countries of remaining players, turning the main stage into something closer to a rowdy soccer stadium – with chants in different languages, beer-soaked energy lasting until the wee hours, and a growing sense that life-changing money is within reach for someone in that room. 

That’s also when the WSOP really feels like a global phenomenon with an emphasis on the World Series of Poker.

The new stage area also features "the cluster" – an additional 16 tables with a dedicated film crew. 

"We're trying to move from a boring live stream where there are hours of nothing interesting happening,” Chochon said, “to a more highlight style where everything we're showing is interesting." 

The feed runs on a delay, he explained, so producers already know a moment is worth airing before it goes out.

There's a certain ironic consistency in how much change has occurred at the WSOP this summer. Most significant is ESPN's return as a broadcast partner. The sports network carried the Series for nearly two decades before the WSOP moved to CBS Sports in 2021. 

Now, after a five-year separation, the WSOP and ESPN are back together. ESPN will air every day of the Main Event, with approximately 100 hours of original programming and a three-night live finale Aug. 3-5. 

Growing a Global Brand

For all the changes visible at this year’s WSOP, Chochon says it’s just a prelude. 

"We are not there yet,” Chochon said. “Everything this year is to build for next year. That's why we're back on ESPN. We're going to create the atmosphere for something bigger happening in the next few years."

In addition to the Series in Las Vegas, the WSOP brand has focused on hosting tentpole events beyond America. And these results suggest poker – er, I mean the WSOP – is only getting bigger.

The WSOP Europe, held this year in Prague, made history in April with a main event that drew more than 2,600 participants and generated a record €13 million prize pool. 

And in December, the 2025 WSOP Paradise in the Bahamas hosted its second annual “Super Main Event” – a $25,000 buy-in tournament that featured 2,891 entrants, creating the largest prize pool in history ($72 million), not including the traditional WSOP Main Event in Las Vegas. 

(Bernhard Binder, an online qualifier from Austria, defeated French businessman Jean-Noël Thorel heads-up to win the bracelet and a $10 million first prize.)

This year, the WSOP Paradise will move from the Atlantis casino-resort on Paradise Island to the Baha Mar Resort in Nassau. 

Chochon calls it "probably one of the nicest properties in the world," and cited it as another example of the WSOP’s ongoing improvements.

Playing the Long Game

We ended our walk and sat at one of the feature tables on the main stage, a vantage point most players only dream about. Chochon reminisced about the audience sizes at past Main Event final tables. "In 2015, there were like 2,500 people in the audience," he said. 

I remembered my first year watching in 2016 – yikes, 10 years ago! – with crowds so big that it required a special wristband to sit in the stands.

“I genuinely love the brand and its history,” Chochon said. “To me, this is the best job in the world because it combines passion with work.”

While the size of the Main Event field has long been a barometer for the poker world’s health, what matters, he reiterates, is the content being built around it.

"What we're trying to build here is content," Chochon said. "It's all about stories and bringing back poker on TV."