Jack Binion and the Family Behind the World Series of Poker

The World Series of Poker exists because Benny Binion wanted foot traffic for his casino, and his son Jack ran the operational side for three decades.

That's the simplest accurate version of the story. The details are specific and worth knowing if you want to understand how a promotional gimmick for Binion's Horseshoe grew into a tournament series with roughly 90,000 entrants and nine-figure prize pools each summer.

The short answer

Jack Binion co-ran the World Series of Poker from its beginning in 1970 through the sale of Binion's Horseshoe in 1998. Along the way, the WSOP transformed from a five-man invitational played at a single casino into the dominant global poker tournament franchise. Jack Binion was the operations lead who made that possible, alongside his father Benny and various other Binion family members.

Origin: 1970

In 1970, Benny Binion invited a small group of high-stakes poker players to play a marathon series of cash games at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas. There was no tournament structure. At the end of it, the players voted Johnny Moss the "World's Best Poker Player." That was the first World Series of Poker.

The 1971 edition introduced freezeout tournament structure, with a $5,000 buy-in and 7 entrants. Johnny Moss won again. The Main Event had been invented, though still at tiny scale.

Jack Binion, then in his early 30s, was already working in the family's casino operations. He took over the day-to-day running of the tournament series as it grew through the 1970s.

Scaling 1970s to 1990s

The Main Event field size over time:

• 1970: no formal Main Event (vote-based)
• 1971: 6 entrants
• 1972: 8
• 1976: 22 (Doyle Brunson's first win)
• 1982: 104 entrants
• 1991: 215
• 1998: 350

Growth was steady but not explosive. The WSOP was a niche event during the 1970s and 1980s, attended primarily by professional poker players and known to a small public audience. The Main Event prize pool reached $1 million for the first time in 1991 (215 entrants at $10,000 each equals $2.15 million, with various prize distributions).

Jack Binion's operational contributions included:

• expanding the tournament from a single event to a full series of bracelet events across multiple games (Omaha, Seven-Card Stud, etc.)
• formalizing tournament rules and structure
• handling disputes and integrity issues as stakes grew
• maintaining the Horseshoe's reputation as the "honest table" in Las Vegas

The 1998 transition

In 1998, Jack Binion divested from Binion's Horseshoe after internal family disputes. The casino was sold to a new ownership group, and the WSOP went through a period of uncertainty. The event continued at Binion's through 2004.

In 2004, Harrah's Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) bought the WSOP brand for an estimated $10-15 million and moved the tournament series to the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino. Binion's Horseshoe continued as a property but without the flagship tournament.

This transition is the pivot point. The Binion family was no longer running the WSOP; corporate casino operations took over.

The Moneymaker era (2003-2008)

In 2003, Chris Moneymaker, an amateur accountant from Tennessee, won the WSOP Main Event for $2.5 million after qualifying via a $39 PokerStars satellite. ESPN's coverage and the "anyone can win" narrative created a poker boom.

Main Event participation by year, showing the boom:

• 2003: 839 entrants
• 2004: 2,576
• 2005: 5,619
• 2006: 8,773
• 2007: 6,358 (after UIGEA passed, dampening U.S. participation)
• 2008: 6,844

The WSOP's commercial significance grew enormously. Main Event prize pools exceeded $80 million in some years. The tournament series (now 60+ events) became the center of poker's professional calendar.

This was no longer the Binion family's operation. Jack had left; Caesars ran it; the cultural branding retained the Binion name mostly as heritage.

Current scale

As of 2023, the WSOP runs roughly 95 events over a six-to-seven-week summer schedule, with total entrants across all events in the range of 170,000 to 200,000. The Main Event alone typically draws 8,000 to 10,000 entrants at the $10,000 buy-in, with prize pools above $75 million.

The first-place prize for the Main Event is typically in the $10-12 million range, with the exact figure depending on the field size and payout structure. For context: the 1971 Main Event first prize was $30,000.

What Jack Binion built that endured

Several structural choices from the early Binion-era WSOP that persist today:

• bracelet structure: the gold bracelet awarded for each event win has been the WSOP's core prestige signal since 1976
• televised final table: Binion's era experimented with TV coverage; CBS and later ESPN built on this
• hole cards (eventually): introduced by the Late Night Poker series in the UK (1999), then adopted by ESPN's WSOP coverage in 2002, drove the modern televised poker format
• tournament structure: the freezeout format, with increasing blinds, is now universal
• downtown Las Vegas legacy: Binion's Horseshoe (now Binion's Gambling Hall) still carries some WSOP heritage events, including the Senior Series

Context: how this compares to other gambling institutions

• World Series of Poker (founded 1970): 95 events annually, 170K+ entrants, ~$300 million total prize pool
• WPT (founded 2002): televised tour, smaller fields, higher buy-ins on average
• European Poker Tour (founded 2004): European circuit, mid-field sizes, strong prestige
• Triton Super High Roller Series (founded 2015): small-field, six-to-seven-figure buy-ins

The WSOP remains the largest by volume and the most culturally significant. Its durability is a function of being first, being in Las Vegas, and being cheap enough to qualify into (through satellites) that the Moneymaker narrative could repeat in principle.

The family legacy

Jack Binion went on to operate several Horseshoe-branded casinos in the Midwest (Mississippi, Louisiana, Indiana) after the Horseshoe sale, selling most of those to Harrah's/Caesars in the 2004 transaction that also bought the WSOP rights. He remains a figure in casino industry history but not in WSOP operations.

Benny Binion died in 1989. Several other Binion family members (Ted, Becky) had varying roles in the casino and later developments; Ted Binion's 1998 death under contested circumstances has its own substantial folklore, but is separate from the WSOP operational history.

The WSOP was founded as a promotional stunt by a Texas gambler who ran a downtown casino. It is now a $300 million annual franchise owned by a major casino corporation. The arc of that transition, over 54 years, is the story of poker's mainstreaming.

The summary

Jack Binion didn't invent the WSOP; his father did, in the marketing sense. But Jack ran it for nearly three decades of incremental growth, maintained its credibility through the pre-boom years, and built the structural template that Caesars later scaled. The family's name is still on the bracelets, even if the operational connection ended 20 years ago.