Everyone in the poker world knows that the WSOP has grown significantly over the last decade, but not many people can tell you by how much.

Instead of just giving you numbers, I made a nifty graph showing the trend of players and prize pools for the WSOP since 2000.

As you would have guessed, the two lines are very similar, but due to each year of the WSOP having a different number of events, with different amounts of buy-in, the two lines aren’t perfectly congruent.

One aspect of the graph which may seem surprising to some people is how the prize pools for 2007-2009 are all greater than 2006, the year of the largest WSOP Main Event to date.

The increased total prize pool in 2008 comes from two changes made by the WSOP:

1. More events were added, including massive field small buy-in "donkaments"
2. 2008 marked first year of the annual $50,000 buy-in H.O.R.S.E event.

Despite a kneecapped economy in 2009, the total prize pool still came in as the second largest to date. In addition to the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event, the 2009 prize pool got a boost from the one-off $40,000 buy-in Hold'em event, marking the 40th anniversary of the WSOP.

In case you’re wondering, I got all numbers for players and prize pools from the official WSOP webpage.

-Lind