Later this week, hundreds of the world’s best poker players will suffer through their worst day of 2007.

The worldwide Texas Hold ‘Em explosion has spawned thousands of tournaments paying out hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and a win at any of those events carries with it a certain amount of prestige in the poker community. But for most top pros and leading amateur players, only one tournament really matters. Play route 66 poker.

In the 30 or so years after the legendary “Amarillo Slim” Preston beat a handful of players to win the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas in 1972, the event grew steadily in popularity, stature and prize money. Since 2003, though, the WSOP Main Event — which begins Friday at the Rio Hotel and Casino and climaxes a month-long series of tournaments — has exploded into a national phenomenon. It has become so important, in fact, that virtually everyboy who’s anybody in the poker world admits that the day they’re eliminated from the Main Event is the low point of his or her year.

And, with thousands of amateur players now making the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas each summer to try for the money and prestige that go with winning a World Series bracelet, the odds continue to mount against the pros, many of whom made names for themselves in the days when the WSOP was just a friendly little gathering of the world’s best players.

Although the national poker boom might have eventually happened anyway, Chris Moneymaker’s win in the 2003 Main Event was probably Ground Zero for the current explosion in Hold ‘Em’s popularity worldwide. A virtual unknown before his win over a field of less than 900 players four years ago, Moneymaker was the kind of Everyman who captured the imagination of the average poker player competing in a weekly home game and dreaming of someday knocking heads with heavyweights like Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan.

Moneymaker showed the poker world that those dreams could come true, and by the time he captured his record $2.5 million first prize, online poker was also starting to take off. Dr. Bruce VanHorn, a pathologist at Valley View Regional Hospital who was runner-up to Huck Seed in the 1996 Main Event, said the two events probably combined to make the World Series of Poker what it is today.

“That (2003) was the year a lot of people started qualifying over the internet,” said VanHorn, who competed in the Main Event nine times between 1996 and 2005. “They had a few qualifying tournaments on the internet before that, but not a lot of people were playing online poker.”

The year after Moneymaker’s win, more than 2,300 players competed in the Main Event, with another unknown, Greg Raymer, taking home a $5 million first prize, and in 2005 Australian Joseph Hachem beat an even bigger field to earn $7.5 million. Last year, Jamie Gold continued the parade of amateur winners, outlasting more than 8,000 other players and banking an eye-popping $12.5 million.

When the 2007 Main Event begins Friday, upwards of 10,000 players are expected, with a first prize estimated at $15 million, and VanHorn said this year’s winner — amateur or pro — can trace his big payday back to the aptly-named Moneymaker and his win in 2003.

“I think it was a combination of the fact that he had never won any money and internet poker exploding at the same time,” VanHorn said in explaining the increase in poker’s popularity since Moneymaker’s upset.

In the WSOP’s first quarter-century, the Main Event was dominated by America’s top pros, several of whom achieved legendary status.

Brunson, the “Godfather of Poker”

won back-to-back titles in 1976 and 1977 and, through a series of books, passed on some of his best secrets to the current generation of players; Stu Ungar, poker’s first young gun, won in 1980 and 1981, then, just over a year after making one of the most amazing comebacks in poker history to win the 1997 Main Event, he was found dead in a cheap Las Vegas motel room of heart failure brought on by years of drug abuse; Chan — who had a cameo role in the Matt Damon film “The Rounders” — won in 1987 and 1988 and finished second to Phil Helmuth in 1989; and current top pros Dan Harrington, Huck Seed, Scotty Nguyen and Carlos Mortensen all captured titles between 1990 and 2001.

But since Mortensen won six years ago, amateurs have dominated the main event. Robert Varkonyi, who, like Moneymaker, Raymer and Gold, has never won another major title, rode an unbelievable string of cards to the 2002 crown, and VanHorn predicted that, no matter how skilled the opposition is, the 2007 Main Event winner will, in the end, probably be the guy who, like Varkonyi, Moneymaker and Gold, has the poker gods on his side throughout the marathon poker tournament.

“You have to be EXTREMELY lucky to win now,” VanHorn said. “I almost think to win any tournament you have to draw out once or twice when you don’t have the best cards, and in that thing you have to go in with the worst hand three or four times and get lucky. There are just too many people to wade through.

“It doesn’t matter how good you are,” he added. “You have to catch some cards to get in position to win. If you don’t, you’re going to go out.”

VanHorn won’t compete at the Main Event for the second straight year, but he has already cashed at the WSOP twice in 2007, finishing sixth in a pot limit Hold ‘Em event (his stay at the final table in that tournament will be telecast on ESPN during tape-delayed coverage of the WSOP later this year) and 35th out of over 2,000 players & women poker players in a No Limit Hold ‘Em tournament last month. He said the World Series of Poker these days is a lot more than just the Main Event.

“They’ve probably added 40 or 50 tournaments (to the WSOP schedule) from when it was at Binion’s,” VanHorn said. “Back then, it was just 20 days of tournaments; now it’s 35 days, with two every day.”

Poker News Source: Ada Evening News