world series odds

In 1969 Tom Moore bought the Holiday Hotel in Reno and held what he called "The Texas Gamblers Reunion." Essentially a who's who of the gambling fraternity, including Benny and Jack Binion, and several of the Texas Rounders - Amarillo Slim Preston, Doyle Brunson, Treetop Straus, Johnny Moss, "Corky" McCorquodale, Aubrey Day, Puggy Pearson, Jimmy Casella, Bill Boyd, Syd Wyman, Long Diddie, and Jimmy the Greek. Even Minnesota Fats, who was in town giving a pool exhibition showed up.
There wasn't a Main Event winner, hell there wasn't even a Main Event, but the seed of the WSOP had been planted.
Said Binion in a 1973 interview "So we enjoyed it very much, everybody enjoyed it so; good get together too, you know. So Tom Moore sold out, so I says, "Well, we'll just put it on." Arid Jack took ahold of it (my oldest son), went to puttin' it on. So we've really improved it over what it did--we improve it every year."
While Benny loved the idea, his family wasn't sold, with the profitability of poker in question Benny was on his own. But to his credit he pushed ahead and in May 1970 Benny opened a poker room in his casino and put the word out. The faithful answered his call and before long all the top players were there, Benny even made sure Minnesota Fats and Titanic Thompson were there, just so all the greats could be in the one place at the same time.
Now while these gambling men just did what they always did, play poker, Benny Binion was thinking big, and he had a big name, the World Series of Poker. Unfortunately it just didn't capture the general publics attention, it was missing something, after all they just played poker and at the end they voted Johnny Moss the champion.
A feature writer for the Los Angeles Times there to check out the event, Ted Thackrey Jr.suggested to Amarillo Slim they needed to make it more competitive to increase interest in the event. "You got to have a winner, a real winner," Thackrey said. "You need to find some way to make it a contest. If you want to get the press involved and turn the World Series into a real sporting event, you need to give it some structure, create some drama, and make it like a real tournament."
Since every time poker was played with a big crowd it had been a freezeout, this was the obvious solution, chips moving back and forth just wasn't as exciting as a player being eliminated. When 1971 rolled around a new format was born, six players shelled out $5000 for a shot at taking home the whole booty of $30000. Johnny Moss backed up his 'voted' title from the previous year by eliminating the other five players, guaranteeing his place in history as the first WSOP winner.
It was only a year later that Binion discussed the World Series with interviewer Mary Ellen Glass. "This poker game here gets us a lot of attention," he told Glass. "We had seven players last year, and this year we had 13. I look to have better than 20 next year. It's even liable to get up to be 50, might get up to be more than that." Binion then paused, and as if gazing into the future, prophesied, "It will eventually."