Until the Big One for One Drop begins at the 2014 World Series of Poker this Sunday, there are all sorts of things that we won’t know about the second million-dollar-entry-fee tournament in poker history. We won’t know whether the tournament will hit its 52-player cap. We won’t know the identities of the satellite qualifiers from the WSOP or the Bellagio, nor those of the three anonymous businessmen in the field. And of course, we won’t know who will emerge from that field as the champion.
Before the cards get in the air, though, there is plenty of complete information on the table. The million-dollar buy-in has attracted a number of high-stakes cash game specialists. The 11.1-percent cut of that sum going to the One Drop Foundation will do wonders for people in need of clean drinking water. The tournament field will feature a woman for the first time as Vanessa Selbst is a confirmed participant. And we will see a clash of two wealthy subcultures as the highest of high rollers in the poker world do battle against their counterparts from the world of business.
So far as the history of tournament poker goes, the most relevant complete information is that the Big One for One Drop represents tournament poker’s first true step into new high-roller territory since the Main Event buy-in doubled in 1972. The tournament game as we know it today began at the 1971 World Series of Poker with the introduction of freezeouts. Four preliminary tournaments with $1,000 buy-ins were played in five-card Stud, seven-card Stud, Razz, and five-card Draw before the $5,000 Main Event drew six players and gave Johnny Moss his second of three work championship titles. The next year the Main Event buy-in was raised to $10,000, where it has remained for the last 42 years.
As the standard for the most prestigious tournament on the schedule, the $10K buy-in served as the measuring stick for every big-ticket poker tournament introduced at the WSOP over the last decade. The World Championship tournaments in various disciplines like pot-limit Omaha, seven-card Stud, and no-limit 2-7 draw lowball all share a $10K buy-in, designating them as the most prestigious titles in those particular games. The $50K HORSE tournament introduced in 2006, which later evolved into the 10-game mix Poker Players Championship, had prestige conferred upon it from the beginning because of what was, for the time, an abnormally large buy-in that only poker’s greatest players would put on the line. The $40,000 WSOP 40th Anniversary special event in 2009 and the $25K No Limit Hold’em Six Handed event introduced in 2010 shared a similar prestige boost simply because they cost more to enter than the Main Event.
Those buy-ins from the early days of the WSOP seem pretty low by today’s standards, even when the Big One and some of the six-figure high-roller tournaments held in Europe, Asia, and Australia aren’t factored in. Adjusted for inflation, though, the high relative value of the buy-ins from the early days becomes clearer. Those first $1K events in 1971 were equivalent to a $5,675 tournament in 2013, a buy-in level that today draws a reliably tough field of a few hundred players in several different games. And the $5K Main Event was equivalent to $28,378 in 2013 dollars, a level that confers significant prestige today simply because so few players are willing to pay that much to play what is guaranteed to be a small-field tournament.
To get an idea of how the buy-ins of early events stack up against the biggest ones’ ever played at the Series, here’s a table of tournament buy-ins throughout WSOP history, inflation-adjusted for easy comparison with the 1972 $10K Main Event:
Inflation-adjusted WSOP buy-ins, 1972-2013
| Year | Event | Buy-in (1972 dollars) |
| 2012 | $1,000,000 Big One For One Drop | $184,733 |
| 2013 | $100,000 One Drop High Roller | $18,200 |
| 2006 | $50,000 HORSE | $10,478 |
| 1972 | $10,000 No Limit Hold’em Main Event | $10,000 |
| 2009 | $40,000 WSOP 40th Anniversary No-Limit Hold’em | $7,887 |
| 1971 | $5,000 No Limit Hold’em Main Event | $5,165 |
| 2010 | $25,000 No Limit Hold’em Six Handed | $4,852 |
Source: The Inflation Calculator
As the table shows, even the highest-dollar tournament the WSOP had ever put on before the introduction of the Big One for One Drop was barely distinguishable in value from the tournament Amarillo Slim won to become poker’s world champion back in 1972. After accounting for the devaluation of the dollar over the years, the entry fee for the 2006 $50K HORSE championship was worth just a few hundred dollars more than the 1972 Main Event’s $10K buy-in. The buy-in for the $40K WSOP 40th Anniversary No-Limit Hold’em event in 2009 was worth just 78 percent of that for the ’72 Main Event, and that for the $25,000 No Limit Hold’em Six Handed worth less than half. Even last year’s $100K One Drop High Roller wasn’t worth quite twice as much as the most expensive tournament ever held.
In other words, what we’ve been considering high-roller buy-ins at the WSOP over the last decade have really been a return to the kind of money that a player had to risk just to be allowed at the table in the Series’ early days. With an entry fee worth more than 18 times that of any other tournament in WSOP history, the Big One for One Drop completely rewrote the rules for what it means to be a poker high-roller in Vegas during the summer. And now that it’s being offered for a second time, it becomes more than just a one-off event to help charity. It’s an event we’re likely to see again in the future, one that will soon have a two-year history of skewing the all-time tournament winnings leaderboard worse than any single tournament outside of the WSOP Main Event. It is the new standard for recurring high-roller poker tournaments.
