World Series of Poker Listens to Players, Alters Payouts for 2024

The World Series of Poker (WSOP) has announced a change to the upcoming 2024 installment of its annual summer series in Las Vegas. No longer will competitors in most events have to battle it out for hours to achieve a min-cash for little more than the amount they paid to enter. A min-cash will now be at least double the buyin for the majority of events.

More About This News

The news was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by the official World Series of Poker account (@WSOP) on Tuesday, May 21:

Payout Example: New vs. Old

We can take a look at the payout structure of a tournament from last year's WSOP and compare it to 2024's version of the same event to see how things have changed. For instance, event #5 of the 2023 WSOP was $1,500 Dealers Choice 6-Handed, and event #7 of the 2024 WSOP is also $1,500 Dealers Choice 6-Handed.

There were 456 entries in 2023's Dealers Choice tournament, and the payout structure was as follows:

We see that 69 out of 456 participants received a payout or just over 15% of the field. The minimum payment of $2,411 was less than double the buyin, and those eight individuals who received this prize only profited $911 above the amount they paid to play. In fact, all the prizes for 48th place through 69th were less than twice the buyin.

Now let's check out the prize structure for 2024's iteration of this event as provided by the tool linked in WSOP's post. We'll assume, for comparative purposes, that the same number of people join this tournament as they did last year:

As we can see, the same 15% of the field will be paid out. However, the lowest-ranking ITM finishers will each receive more than twice their buyin. This extra money comes at the expense of the top with first place seeing a reduction from $131,879 to $123,631 and the runner-up's payout being reduced from $81,509 to $80,255.

In fact, just the money taken away from the two top spots is enough to top off all positions 48th through 69th from what they were last year up to the $3,000 mark. However, the changes don't stop here. In fact, the entire final table (and down to 11th place) will see their cash rewards reduced slightly while every other ITM position will see a bump.

Main Event Exempted

As stated in the WSOP tweet, the alterations in min cash amount apply to “most events,” not all events. One of the tourneys where the new policy is not in effect is the Main Event. It will continue to feature min cashes of 1.5 times the buyin.

Perhaps the powers that be feel that the money involved in the Main Event is so substantial that the $5,000 profit represented by a min cash should be sufficient to keep players satisfied. If this were the case, though, then the other $10,000-buyin tournaments in the Series should also have remained with the old formula, but they instead will adjust payouts according to the new methodology. The most likely explanation is that the Main Event is the prestige tourney of the WSOP, and so organizers wish to see how their new min cash policy works in reality first before jeopardizing the Main Event with untried and untested notions.

All that being said, though, there will be some updates to the Main Event payouts particularly for the final table. Peruse the final table prize payouts below for the 2023 Main Event and 2024's projected payments to see the differences with the assumption of 10,000 entrants in this year's tournament:

The big change here is that the winner's payout is reduced from $12.1 million to $10 million. Second place also sees a drop of $500,000 to an even $6 million while third remains constant at $4 million. The rest of the final table will see small bumps to their rewards, including a boost for ninth place sufficient for every final table finisher to be able to boast about winning a seven-figure sum.

Why the Changes?

The news about the new WSOP payouts was greeted with widespread acclaim in the poker community. The increase in minimum cashes to double the buyin has not been an especially pressing matter for most players, but there have nevertheless been quite a few people quietly advocating for this change. Here are a few posts from those who welcome this development:

As far as the Main Event payouts go, there was plenty of criticism about the final table prizes for 2023. One major objection people had to the 2023 payout arrangements was the fact that ninth place received $900,000, which was just short of a million. The other big criticism was the big difference in payouts between first and second places.

The new payout schedule addresses both of these points. The difference between first and second has dropped from $5.6 million to just $4 million. Ninth place has received a bump of $100,000 to an even $1,000,000. This means that all final table positions will be worth at least a million dollars, which is great from a marketing standpoint.

Prepare for WSOP

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