Hamilton is by far the most controversial WSOP champion of all-time thanks to his alleged role in the Ultimate Bet Super-User scandal. Showing he still had what it takes to compete, in 2006 Bechtel final tabled the $50k Players Championship at the WSOP, picking up nearly $550k in prize-money and putting his career tournament earnings at $2.5 million. Dastmalchi would go on to win a total three WSOP bracelets in his career.īechtel is the forgotten champion of this era, but his win in 1993 was only one piece of his poker career which has spanned five decades now. 1992: Hamid Dastmalchi (Iran) $1,000,000ĭastmalchi continued the success of Matloubi becoming the second Iranian poker player to win the Main Event, which was the genesis of the future and current crop of Iranian poker players including the late Amir Vahedi and Antonio Esfandiari.Recently, Daugherty’s WSOP Championship bracelet has come up for auction on eBay, but failed to reach the reserve price set by Daugherty. Matloubi later became an investor in Ultimate Bet poker, with many people feeling he was complicit in the Super-User scandal at the site (no proof has ever been put forward on this front however and it remains just speculation).ĭaugherty was the first player to receive a $1 million prize-prize at the WSOP and he parlayed his WSOP win into a number of book deals.

Matloubi was the first non-American to win the WSOP, and the British-Iranian poker pro went on to have a successful poker career throughout the 1990’s. In this article I’ll take a look at the lead-up to the Internet Era during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and the players who managed to capture the coveted WSOP Main Event title. As the year’s pressed on at Binions Horseshoe (the former and original home of the WSOP) the casual poker players who participated in the WSOP grew, culminating with the huge numbers finally achieved in the Internet Era. Prior to the Internet Era (2003- the present) the World Series of Poker was the playground of a small elite group of professional poker players that numbered a couple of hundred, along with a few dozen weekend warrior-type poker players whose estimation of their ability was far from the actual reality.

Wsop winners by year