Over the past decade, we’ve seen plenty of international players make deep runs in the WSOP Main Event. Joe Hachem (Australia, 2005), Peter Eastgate (Denmark, 2008) and Jonathan Duhamel (Canada, 2010) are all non-American Main Event winners who perfectly illustrate this fact. However, we have yet to see a WSOP Main Event that’s featured as many global participants as the 2011 Main Event. The non-US players involved include Martin Staszko (Czech Replublic), Eoghan O’Dea (Ireland), Badih Bou-Nahra (Belize), Anton Makiievskiy (Ukraine), Piuz Heinz (Germany), Samuel Holden (United Kingdom), while the Americans include Phil Collins, Matt Giannetti and Ben Lamb.
As you can see, a rare occurrence has happened where US players are outnumbered 2-1 on the Main Event final table. If you’re good at math, you can see that there’s a two-thirds chance that an international player will win the world’s biggest poker tournament this year. But no matter who wins, the number of people who’ve flown to Las Vegas from different countries is pretty impressive.
Looking at things from an even bigger perspective, the final table makeup perfectly exemplifies how global poker has become with six players joining the November Nine. After all, it’s not exactly cheap for pros to fly to Sin City for this poker extravaganza, and the buy-ins don’t make things any more affordable.
Even still, thousands of international players have anted up $1k, $3k, $5k and $10k buy-ins to play in the 2011 WSOP. And you can definitely count on this trend continuing – especialy in the Pot Limit Omaha sector, where Europeans seem to have claimed this game for their own. Getting back to the subject, it will be interesting to see if we have yet another non-American Main Event winner come November.