In 1970 a group of Texas road gamblers spent several days playing cash games in a downtown Las Vegas casino owned by Benny Binion. When the games ended, Binion asked them to vote for the best player among them. The first round settled nothing, so he asked them to name the second-best player instead, and Johnny Moss won that vote and went home with a silver cup. The tournament that grew out of that private game now fills convention halls on the Strip every summer.
Nevada’s 1931 Gambling Law
Legal card rooms in the city date to a Depression-era decision. Nevada had banned casino gambling in 1909, and on March 19, 1931, Governor Fred Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98, which legalized it again. Freshman assemblyman Phil Tobin introduced the bill, the Senate passed it 13 to 3 and the Assembly passed it 24 to 1, with lawmakers hoping it would bring money into a state hit hard by the Depression. Balzar signed a second bill that day that cut the residency requirement for a divorce to 6 weeks.
Las Vegas had 5,165 residents at the 1930 census, and its population more than doubled the following year as work began on Hoover Dam nearby.
For more than 4 decades afterward, Nevada was the only state with legal casino gambling. New Jersey voters approved casinos for Atlantic City in 1976, and until then a traveler who wanted to play poker in a licensed public room had few choices outside Nevada.
The 1970 Vote and the First Freezeout
The 7 players at that first gathering were Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Walter “Puggy” Pearson, Bryan “Sailor” Roberts, Crandell “Dandy” Addington and Carl Cannon. The 1970 event consisted of cash games with a title attached. Binion was a Texas gambler who had opened his downtown casino in 1951.
The format changed the following year, when the championship became a freezeout in which players were eliminated until one held all the chips. Preston won in 1972 and then appeared on national television talk shows, including The Tonight Show. Winners received a bracelet from 1976 onward, in place of the cup Moss had been given, and the event stayed in the same downtown casino for its first 35 years.
Online Qualifiers and the 2003 Champion
In 2003 Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Tennessee, won his seat in the $10,000 Main Event through an $86 online poker satellite and then won the tournament and $2.5 million. His win was broadcast on ESPN, and it showed viewers that an amateur could qualify cheaply and still beat the professionals.
The 2003 Main Event had 839 entries, and the 2004 event drew 2,576. The count reached 5,619 in 2005 and 8,773 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won $12 million, still the largest first prize in the event’s history. Attendance fell to 6,358 in 2007, but by then the event had outgrown its original home.
The Hole-Card Camera on Television
Earlier broadcasts showed players looking at cards the audience could not see. The hole-card camera, patented by Henry Orenstein on September 19, 1995, let viewers follow each player’s cards as the hand was played. A British program, Late Night Poker, used the technique first, and ESPN’s coverage of the 2002 World Series of Poker brought it to an American audience.
The World Poker Tour premiered on the Travel Channel on March 30, 2003, with small cameras built into the table in front of each seat, and it became the channel’s top-rated show. Sports Illustrated reported that summer that its 3 weekly airings drew between 3 million and 5 million viewers, and a channel spokesman credited the hole-card camera for that audience.
From Downtown to the Strip
The tournament moved in 2005 to a convention center west of the Strip, where it stayed for 17 years. In November 2021 the organizers announced a move to the Las Vegas Strip for 2022, splitting the 53rd edition between 2 connected resorts from May 31 to July 19, with the actor Vince Vaughn named as the event’s celebrity master of ceremonies. The 2021 series had already returned to live play in the fall, after the 2020 edition was held online during the pandemic.
Recent Main Event Fields
The Main Event passed its 2006 record in 2023, with 10,043 entries, and set another record in 2024 with 10,112. The 2025 field of 9,735 was the third largest in the event’s history and produced a prize pool of $90,535,500. On July 16, 2025, Michael Mizrachi beat John Wasnock heads-up to win the title and $10 million, and Wasnock took $6 million for second place. It was his eighth bracelet, and he was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame the same year.
Rake and Revenue in Card Rooms
In a card room, players bet against each other instead of the house, and the room keeps only a small share of each pot, usually about 5%, while paying a dealer for every table. A room therefore needs steady volume, because the overhead of a few busy tables cannot cover the cost of the space, and poker has never earned as much for a casino as slot machines or roulette.
Nevada’s poker revenue peaked at $168 million in 2007 and fell to $123 million by 2012, after a federal crackdown on unlicensed internet poker in April 2011 cut off a supply of new players. At least 8 Las Vegas rooms closed in 2011 and 2012, and at least one was replaced with slot machines, a decision its manager described to the Associated Press as a matter of economics.
Card Rooms on the Strip Today
Visitor numbers set the size of the walk-in market for the city’s card rooms. Las Vegas drew more than 40.8 million visitors in 2023, its highest visitation totals since the 42.5 million recorded in 2019, and about 41.7 million in 2024. The count fell to 38.5 million in 2025, a drop of 7.5%, and the visitors who came went to an average of 3.1 casinos during a trip, fewer than in earlier years.
In March 2026 one more Strip casino announced it was closing its room on March 30, which left the Strip with 8 card rooms. Reporting on the closure tied it to the decline in visitors and noted that the resort planned to replace the tables with other games.
The Silver Cup and the Summer Series
Johnny Moss carried a silver cup out of a downtown casino after a vote among 7 men who knew each other’s games. In July 2025 Michael Mizrachi left the Strip with $10 million after outlasting 9,734 other players. Both prizes came from the same annual event, first decided by a vote among friends and now by a field large enough to fill a convention hall.
