WSOP or Super Bowl - Which is Bigger?
by Bodog Poker | Feb 2 2010
The growth of the game of
poker has been a real phenomenon for the last six years. In that time the size of the tournament has seen fields of more than ten times the 839 entrants that entered in 2003, the year Chris Moneymaker won the
WSOP Main Event championship. ESPN and its affiliates air the coverage of numerous events each year, and millions of people tune in to watch the game crown its champion for another year. The Super Bowl is the greatest football game of the year, and coverage of the game is second to no other annual sporting event. As to which event is bigger, a few simple comparisons should answer that question.
If one compares the television ratings that each event gets, it's easy to see that the Super Bowl is the bigger event. Even with superstar Phil Ivey at the final table of the 2009 WSOP, the two-and a-half hour televised broadcast had 2.1 million viewers for a 1.8 rating. An ESPN statement explaining the overall coverage of the event shows the growth that the game is experiencing every year:
"ESPN's 15-week schedule of World Series of Poker coverage in 2009 included 31 telecasts averaging a 1.0 rating. However, averages for households (1,024,901) and viewership (1,228,008) increased nine and seven percent, respectively, from 2008 and the important Male 25-54 demographic saw a 13 percent jump from 2008."
Ratings for the
Super Bowl are in another ballpark than those of the WSOP. In 2009 the NBC broadcast of the Super Bowl drew a rating of 42.0, and the game has had a rating of over 40.0 since 1991. The Super Bowl had an average of 98.7 million viewers, growing beyond last year's average of 97.5 million. It was also the second-most-watched television program in U.S. history, behind only the M*A*S*H series finale in 1983.
During the WSOP there will be more than 50,000 poker fans and players who will visit the Rio to either play or watch. Players from all over the world travel to Vegas to play in the biggest tournament of the year. And unlike the Super Bowl, the WSOP lasts for more than 40 days and is carried further into the fall, when the final table plays it out for the championship (four months after the tournament began). The Super Bowl hype lasts for only two weeks, but there's such a blitz about the game that commercial sponsors will pay millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl, and most spend a fortune creating their new commercials which will be first seen by the public during the broadcast.
Maybe someday the WSOP will be as popular as the Super Bowl, but for now the two are not even close. As much as 10 billion dollars could be risked on the Super Bowl by more than 200 million people around the world. The Super Bowl is the biggest one-day sports betting event of every year.
