Uncovering WSOP History: An Exclusive Interview with Robert Jen, the World’s Greatest Unknown WSOP Historian

The World Series of Poker (WSOP_ is the most prestigious tournament series in the world. Rich with history, legendary moments, and loads of statistics. But how well can we rely on the information/results of all WSOP editions? With PokerListings, we started digging into the history of this legendary event, and one of the primary sources we use for this is the website of Robert Jen, World’s Greatest Unknown WSOP Historian.

Just a few people have dedicated themselves to uncovering and preserving the details of WSOP history quite like Robert Jen. A historian, blogger, and the creator of the THETA Poker Pro app, Jen runs w50p.com, one of the most reliable resources for WSOP results and insights. Resources where even the WSOP themselves, or The Hendon Mob, can learn a thing or two!

With the help of this interview, we decided it was time to remove the ‘Unknown’ part of Robert Jen’s so-called title of World’s Greatest Unknown WSOP Historian. We dive deep into his research process, his motivations for documenting poker’s biggest event, and the challenges he faced while verifying historical records. This interview is truly inspiring and interesting for any poker player or anyone else involved in the history of poker.

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Melvin Schroen: What inspired you to start documenting WSOP history, and how did your journey evolve from poker to becoming, as we say, the “World’s Greatest Unknown WSOP Historian”?

Robert Jen: I started out as a humble blogger trying to attract eyeballs to my THETA Poker Pro Texas Hold’Em app (for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and even Apple TV). I covered a variety of poker topics related to Texas Holdem. I discussed strategy, reviewed books, and examined poker festivals like Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker. But I found myself drawn into the history of the World Series of Poker because it was the oldest festival with the deepest history and the most interesting stories.

Because the WSOP goes back to when the internet was in its ARPANET infancy, my Google searches would often come up empty. The first article that I wrote required extensive research, which involved collecting all of the WSOP Main Event final hands with their hole and community cards. I still haven’t found the 1971 hand (likely lost to history) and don’t have all the suits for 1972, but both 1974 and 1975 were in question until I found newspaper articles on them (the digitizing of old newspapers has been the key to making my research feasible).

1974: Tucson Daily Citizen, May 25, 1974, page 45
1975: Spartanburg Herald, May 19, 1975, page 2

After that, I was off and running. I like poker, mysteries, and numbers, and WSOP research hit all three perfectly. It’s a million-piece jigsaw puzzle, except that you also have tons of pieces that aren’t part of the puzzle, hundreds of thousands are missing, and some that are damaged, discolored, or blurry. But once you’ve put enough of the pieces in place, a big, beautiful mosaic starts to reveal itself.

My answer to that standard job interview question, “What’s your biggest weakness?” has always been that I’m stubborn. The positive angle is that I’m patient and persistent. I’ve spent thousands of hours (hundreds in UNLV’s Lied Library alone) tracking down every last crumb I could find about the World Series of Poker. I’ve read every book I know of about the WSOP (except for Pius Heinz: My Hands on the Way to the Poker World Champion as I don’t understand German) and tens of thousands of articles in magazines, newspapers, and websites.

I’ve taken thousands of pages of notes and created hundreds of spreadsheets to sort and calculate the data. And since I’m a programmer by training, I’ve written hundreds of helper programs to transform my raw data into presentable tables and populate both my app and my website. It eventually dawned on me that I was the perfect person to do this, and if I didn’t do it, nobody else would.

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Melvin Schroen: Before diving into poker history, you created the THETA Poker Pro app. Can you tell us about that project and how it contributed to your work in the poker world?

Robert Jen: Before I was an iPhone app developer, I was a PalmPilot developer. In fact, I quit my job to write games and educational apps for Jeff Hawkins’ wonderful handheld, pocket-fitting invention. That was a fun ride that lasted about a decade, and just when it became obvious to me that Palm was going to die (despite correctly entering the cell phone market with the Palm Treo in 2008), Apple announced the iPhone. The keynote wasn’t even over before I knew what I was going to do next.

As much as I loved the PalmPilot (never bored waiting in line again), the iPhone was going to be much more powerful. Steve Jobs did his eloquent best to convince everyone that you could create anything you wanted for it by developing web apps. But like many other developers, I wasn’t fooled by his reality distortion field and immediately began prototyping my next great app on my Mac, assuming that the iPhone SDK would eventually be released and that it would be similar enough to the Mac SDK.

Sure enough, a year later, Apple opened up app development for the iPhone, and shortly after the App Store opened, I was able to release THETA Poker, a No-Limit Holdem game that the PalmPilot hadn’t been powerful enough for.

A few years and dozens of releases later, I read Matt Gemmell’s article on Accessibility and was moved to rewrite my app so that the blind and vision-impaired could play poker.

That second app was THETA Poker Pro, and although it never broke into the big time, the Accessibility features were beloved. I exchanged emails with many of my blind users regularly and even met one of them (we still get together for a meal occasionally when I visit Las Vegas).

As a programmer, I suffer from a severe case of featuritis, so the Pro app had dozens of configurable parameters. You could customize your own ring games, shootouts, and freezeout tournaments or play in “Career Mode” and try to work your way up through progressively larger and more difficult tourneys ending with a 10,000-player championship (a decade before the WSOP Main Event would reach five figures). I coded the bots to play like humans, not computers, and assigned them random profiles, so some were looser and some tighter, some more aggressive and some more passive (less of these at higher levels). My favourite feature was that it was very fast, with a “Skip to End of Hand” option that would quickly move you on to the next hand after you folded (better than Full Tilt’s “Rush Poker” because you stay at the same table). I could easily play 1,000 hands an hour (without having to multi-table), which made for very efficient practice.

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Melvin Schroen: What was the vision behind launching your website, w50p.com? How has it helped you share WSOP history with the poker community?

Robert Jen: A few years later, through no fault of my own, THETA Poker Pro was kicked out of the App Store. I could have created an LLC and gotten the app back live, but I decided it was time to move on.

[Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/09/apps-caught-up-in-app-store-ban-gambling-apps/]

I had penned enough blog articles about the WSOP to write a book, so I did. I didn’t want to kill any trees, and I wanted more bells and whistles than an ebook could provide, so I created the Poker Omnibus W50P app, timing the initial release to coincide with the start of the 50th World Series of Poker.

A couple of years later, I decided to create a free version of the app, which would make money from ads instead of a one-time purchase price, but when I submitted the new app to Apple, they rejected it. I’m pretty sure if I kept resubmitting, I would eventually get a reviewer who would approve it, but I was so ticked off at Apple for this second denial that I decided to build an entire website instead.

The big benefit is that the web version is available to everyone, not just iPhone and iPad users. It’s not quite as pretty or smooth but includes some features (like the Wikipedia-inspired “Random Page” button) that aren’t in the app; it’s also much more searchable (both internally and externally). So maybe Steve Jobs was right after all—‘Web apps for the win.’

[Website: https://w50p.com/po | Contents: https://w50p.com/po/pocontents.html]

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Melvin Schroen: You’re currently working on the Poker Omnibus app. What can you tell us about its features and your goals for this new project?

Robert Jen: I already covered this above as it predates the website. The app has all the same data as the website but has a few extra features and is faster and smoother. And of course, it utilizes the full screen of your iPhone or iPad much better. It’s a one-time purchase with no ads or in-app purchases (although the web version is very light on ads with just one at the bottom of each article). The next big update should happen in the next week or two.

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Melvin Schroen: What are some of the most surprising or lesser-known facts about the early years of the WSOP that you’ve uncovered?

Robert Jen:

• I’m currently working on a new section of the website and app called “Top Ten,” which lets me explore completely random ideas that may not fit neatly elsewhere in the hierarchy.

One of my favourite Top Ten lists is WSOP Myths. And #1 on that list is that Jack Straus was NOT down to “a chip and a chair” before coming back to win the 1982 WSOP Main Event. Any time “Hustler magazine” and “World Series of Poker” appear in the same sentence, it’s going to be an interesting story.

• For most of the early years of the WSOP, tournaments are listed in the wrong order, sorted by the winners’ last names instead of chronologically. A couple of years are even in reverse alphabetical order!

This error dates at least as far back as PokerPages.com in 2000, but it’s possible they were propagating someone else’s errors.

Over the course of a decade and using hundreds of sources, I have sleuthed out the correct order and most of the actual dates for almost every event.

This impacts at least one famous first as two players became the first foreigners to win bracelets in 1988. In alphabetical order, France’s Gilbert Gross was the first to break through ($2,500 Pot-Limit Omaha), but the actual honor belongs to Norway’s Thor Hansen who won the $5,000 Seven-Card Stud four days and four events earlier.

This greatly reduces the number of players who actually won back-to-back tournaments in the same festival. In 1993, Phil Hellmuth and Ted Forrest did both win two events in a row, but each won a third, unconnected event. Only six players had gone back-to-back before them, and only one has done it since (way back in 1995).

• Several early tournaments are completely missing from the internet. The 1972 WSOP probably had five events, just like 1971. Most websites list just the Five-Card Stud and the Main Event, but WSOP.com calls these events #2 and #5. I agree with them and am pretty sure who won one of the missing events and have a strong guess at another.

WSOP.com is missing a tournament in 1974 and another in 1981. The Hendon Mob (and other sites) are missing both of those plus another in 1983, which notably put Gabe Kaplan over two million dollars in career tournament winnings (WSOP and non-WSOP). Unfortunately, “Mr. Kotter” cashed for the first time in nine years in 2023 and spoiled my big scoop.

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Melvin Schroen: How has the WSOP evolved over the years in ways you find most significant or surprising? Are there specific turning points that stand out to you?

Robert Jen:

1971: Benny Binion changed the WSOP from cash games to freezeout tournaments, making the events much more fan-friendly and press-worthy while also attracting more players dreaming of a big score.

1977: The WSOP added a Ladies Championship (officially called the Women’s Seven-Card Stud then). Before this, the WSOP was literally missing half of the population as only a handful of women had ever entered a WSOP tournament. The demand proved to be so great that the tourney set a then-record with 93 entrants.

1982: Eric Drache created the first satellite event, giving many more players access to WSOP bracelet events. The growth of the WSOP during the 1980s was almost entirely fuelled by satellites at the Horseshoe and other Las Vegas casinos.

2002: WSOP broadcasts started using hole card cameras. This let casual poker players at home feel smarter than the players and thus more likely to want to compete in WSOP events. [Besides inventing the hole cam, Henry Orenstein also invented the Transformers toy and won a WSOP bracelet, making him one of my favourite poker players ever.]

2003: WSOP tournaments, largely thanks to Tom McEvoy’s efforts, went smoke-free. This immediately improved the health of all the players and tournament staff and attracted a new segment of the poker-playing population. [When my dad used to light up after dinner, I’d always leave the table. I’d never play poker in a smoke-filled room.]

Chris Moneymaker and ESPN’s constant rearing of his Main Event victory might merit a mention here too ;-).

2015: The WSOP added online play. Just five years later, running tournaments online saved the entire 2020 WSOP.

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Melvin Schroen: Are there any players or moments in WSOP history that you feel are underappreciated and deserve more recognition?

Robert Jen:

• Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder wasn’t paid by the Binions, yet he helped organize and publicize the early years of the World Series of Poker and posted odds on each player’s chances of winning the Main Event. [He announced for the “CBS Sports Spectacular” coverage of the Main Event in 1973, 1977, and 1979, but I first heard of him from boxing (and Muhammad Ali) on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”.]

• Jesse Alto never won a bracelet, but he had eight WSOP Main Event Top 9 finishes: 1974 4th (unpaid), 1975 6th (unpaid), 1976 2nd (unpaid), 1978 5th ($21,000), 1984 2nd ($132,000), 1985 6th ($42,000), 1986 4th ($62,700), & 1988 9th ($21,000).

• In 1986, Billy Baxter successfully convinced the IRS to allow professional poker players to declare their winnings as earned income rather than unearned income. This allowed many more players to make a living playing poker, which in turn helped the WSOP grow.

• Roland Israelashvili had the most bracelet event cashes in the 1990s with an even 100, a dozen more than Daniel Negreanu. He has set numerous records, including being the first player to reach 500 combined WSOP and WSOP Circuit cashes. He was on the short list of “Best Players Without a Bracelet” until last year.

• After 29 years, THREE players all broke An Tran’s record with their seventh final tables of the year on the same day, November 21, 2021. Although Phil Hellmuth’s tournament started first on the 19th (Event #84 $50,000 High Roller Pot-Limit Omaha), both Daniel Negreanu and Joao Vieira made it to the final table of the next tournament starting on the 20th (Event #85 $50,000 High Roller Hold ‘Em) first. According to WSOP.com’s tournament updates, Event #85 reached 9-way around 4:52 p.m., while Event #84 didn’t get there until 7:20 p.m. [being PLO, it reached its official 8-player final table at 7:52 p.m., but for simplicity I always define “final table” as the top 9].

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Melvin Schroen: How do you think modern innovations, like live streaming and digital archives, are influencing how poker history is recorded and remembered?

Robert Jen: For now, poker history is being lost because those archives aren’t searchable. But AI is here to solve that problem, so it will mostly be a question of getting access to the videos.

It was a sad day when Poker Central (now PokerGO) bought the rights to all the old WSOP Main Event videos and pulled them from YouTube. Fortunately, PokerGO reposted them (albeit with ads) last year.

Melvin Schroen: We can agree that it must be frustrating to miss results. Can you share an example of a particularly elusive piece of information you’re trying to uncover?

Robert Jen: I’ve already mentioned a few, but here are some more:

1. In 1996, Germany’s Horst Koch produced a 35-minute video on the WSOP (Huck Seed’s Main Event win), which didn’t have any coverage in the U.S. I’d love to track down a tape of that.
2. I don’t know the seating arrangement or starting chip counts for the Main Event final table from 1971 to 1977. I’m also missing the chip counts for 1979.
3. I know the chip leaders for every day of every Main Event except for:
   • Day 1 of 1989, 1991, and 1999.
   • Day 2 of 1990 (probably Stu Ungar), 1991, and 1992 (Hamid Dastmalchi, but I don’t have his chip count, nor do I have Puggy Pearson’s in 1973).
4. I don’t know the Last Main Event Champion Standing for 1975 and 1978 (neither player cashed).
5. I don’t know the Main Event Final Table Bubble Boy (10th place) for 1982. I’m missing quite a few Main Event Bubble Boys: 1982, 1985, 1987-90, 1993-94, 1996, 1998-99, and 2003.
6. My WSOP page-a-day style calendar had to resort to filler trivia for fifteen days of the year that had no significant news: January 3, 9, 17, and 28; February 12, 20, 22, and 29; March 3, 8, 25, and 26; April 2; August 27; and September 3.

I don’t know how many of these answers the WSOP has, but I’m pretty sure they could be a huge help to me. And of course, if any of your readers has any leads, those would be just as appreciated.

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Melvin Schroen: What has been the most rewarding or fulfilling moment in your work as a WSOP historian?

Robert Jen: Card Player magazine cited my website in an article on the Last Woman Standing last year. I was just about to fact-check their chart when I noticed the credit.

Clearly, I have a long way to go before I can consider this project a success. But, stubborn guy that I am, I still believe, “If you build it, [they] will come.”

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Melvin Schroen: How does your approach to fact-checking and verifying historical details help maintain the accuracy and credibility of your work?

Robert Jen: When I first started blogging about poker, I wasn’t very meticulous and would only occasionally throw in a footnote documenting my sources. Now, every time I jot anything down, I include the reference (web link or book/magazine/newspaper date and page).

I’m sure there are many errors in my output (I’m in the middle of a major update, so I know there are definitely hundreds of mistakes currently on w50p.com at this very moment). But I’m also certain that I have more accurate information than anyone else in the world. My list of sources understates the volume of the material I’ve pored through (e.g., the Benny Binion collection at Lied Library alone contains thousands of pages, and both Poker Player Newspaper and Card Player magazine have hundreds of issues):

• References
• WSOP ME Books

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Melvin Schroen: What challenges have you faced in maintaining and updating such a comprehensive website like w50p.com?

Robert Jen: I’m just one guy. My older son helped out with some programming that I didn’t know how to do, but otherwise, I’m a one-man band: researcher, analyst, writer, coder, graphic artist, and, as I’m keenly aware, the world’s worst marketer. Each annual update takes me several months, but I collect information and write new articles all year round.

My biggest challenge was that much of the old data isn’t available online. I’ve made four annual trips to Las Vegas to do research at UNLV’s Lied Library, which houses the voluminous Benny Binion Collection and back issues of poker magazines and newspapers, as well as microfilm of old Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun newspapers.

The newest challenge is the sheer number of tournaments, with over 200 bracelet events each year (the total number of bracelet events didn’t reach 200 until the twentieth WSOP in 1989). You’d think with everything done on computers now that the error rate would go down, but that is definitely not the case. And hundreds, if not thousands, of players have multiple WSOP pages (usually one for live events and one or more for online events).

I sincerely hope that GGPoker has a better appreciation for the history of their great festival and will work with me on the accuracy of their results.

Unlike Don Williams, who never quite shed his “World’s Best Unknown Poker Player” title, I’d like to make this my lasting legacy by removing the “Unknown” from my title.

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Melvin Schroen: Do you think the WSOP still holds the same prestige today as it did in its early years, or does it surpass it even? Why or why not?

Robert Jen: The WSOP itself is as prestigious as ever, but as Erik Seidel and many others have stated, the value of each individual bracelet has been greatly diluted by the proliferation of events, especially the online ones.

GGPoker needs to be very careful with this. If there are 1,000 WSOP bracelets available every year, they won’t be any more valuable than Circuit rings, and the WSOP will have “jumped the shark.”

I wouldn’t be averse to categorizing live and online bracelets separately as a compromise solution. This would also help a little with the problem of online players using computer assistance, which already stained two of last year’s tournaments.

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Melvin Schroen: As poker becomes increasingly global, do you see significant shifts in how poker’s history is defined or celebrated?

Robert Jen: I think the top live events will always be fine, but unless things change with GGPoker, the WSOP’s history is going to be lost at the bottom because it’s not even being written. In addition to the 2023 tournament I mentioned earlier, most of WSOP Europe, the entire Paradise Island festival, and three other 2024 events still have no results on WSOP.com:

• Missing WSOP Europe Results
• Paradise Island Festival Results
• Other Missing Results
• Other Missing Results
• Other Missing Results

The WSOP needs to resume putting out a press release after every WSOP bracelet event (even an automated AI-crafted article would be a huge improvement over today’s void, although including an interview and a current photo of the winner would be better). Although WSOP.com still has a News section, it’s rarely updated — as of today, the two newest articles are from September 25 and December 18.

The WSOP needs to do everything they can to enhance the prestige of a bracelet (even if they don’t believe it themselves). Most of their online event pages don’t even get Updates, Structure, or Prize Pool tabs despite the fact that the data for the latter two already exists electronically.

Also, while I’m glad that the Poker Hall of Fame now has a display of framed photographs, the online version is sorely lacking.

I think my Poker Hall of Fame deck is a bit better (and the Player decks are one of the main things that are better in the app as tapping on the card switches from the fronts to the backs):

This could be implemented as a virtual 3D museum that you could tour without leaving home (alas, beyond my current skillset).

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Melvin Schroen: If you could have dinner with any poker legend from WSOP history, who would it be and why? And what would be the main course?

Robert Jen: I’d time travel to May 19, 1972, and treat Johnny Moss to dinner at the Double Belly Buster Buffet. As Men Nguyen says, “All you can eat, baby!” (It’s an excellent deal).

Appetizers would include Artie Cobb Salad (topped with the Nuts):

Q: What games were played at the 1969 Texas Gambler’s Reunion and who won them? This was the festival that led directly to the creation of the WSOP (not the Moss-Dandolas match I’ll ask about later). Same questions about the 1968 event, although I suspect that at most it included some informal poker games but nothing organized.

Entrees would include Fish and Chips (returning later for the Rib-Eye):

Q: How did the vote really go for the 1970 overall champion and who came in second?

Q: What was the final hand of the 1971 Main Event? (I’d also like him to confirm that his heads-up opponent was Jack Straus, not Puggy Pearson as some sources claim).

Q: What tournaments took place in 1972 and who won them?

Dessert would include two scoops of sherbet, one Razz-berry and one Rainbow:

Q: What’s the true story of your fabled match with Nick the Greek Dandolas?

[BTW, Nick the Greek wins the award for the most commonly misspelt name in poker history as it’s almost always given as “Dandolos” (like his Wikipedia entry: Nick Dandolos) or “Dandalos”. The correct version as the professional gambler very clearly spelt it out as “D-A-N-D-O-L-A-S” in a 1945 True magazine article republished in the August 1985 issue of *Gambling Times]