The Colossus: How it Has Reshaped the World Series of Poker, Ten Years In

The tenth edition of the Colossus at the World Series of Poker wrapped up on Tuesday, with Courtenay Williams of Los Angeles besting 16,300 competitors to come out on top. Among those he defeated at the final table were noted pros Matt Glantz and Ryan Leng, who came in third and seventh place, respectively. Williams took home $542,540 for his troubles, as well as a WSOP Gold Bracelet.

Over the past decade, the Colossus has become a staple of the series. Its success has also shaped the series as a whole, shifting the focus from poker’s elite to the community as a whole. The range of price points is much wider than it was during the poker boom years, and attendance has grown as a result.

The Colossus began in 2015 and was the first open-field WSOP event since 1980 to have a buy-in of less than $1,000. Its friendly get-in price of $565 attracted a record number of players and ensured that it wouldn’t be just a one-off experiment.

Creating such a gargantuan spectacle was part of the point of the Colossus, as the name suggests. More importantly, however, it aimed to bring more recreational players to the WSOP. In that regard, it was a massive success. It paved the way for WSOP to add other lower buy-in events to the schedule in subsequent years.

Colossus Field Sizes Over the Years

The Colossus was born in 2015, a pivotal year for the WSOP. That summer also saw the introduction of the first-ever online bracelet event, which has since expanded into a whole parallel series of online events.

Just running that inaugural Colossus was a challenge for WSOP staff. It immediately set the record as the largest live poker tournament of all time with 22,374 entries. Despite WSOP’s best efforts to prepare for the crowd, the opening days of the event were a circus in many ways. The Rio, the venue for the WSOP at the time, struggled to find room to seat so many players. The attempts to find a solution included the now-infamous “El Burro” section, which consisted of makeshift tables outside the old Guy Fieri Mexican restaurant.

No other year has quite matched the intensity of that inaugural tournament. However, the Colossus has rebounded in recent years after hitting a low point in 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instant Fame for Early Colossus Winners

Main Event winners become instant household names in the poker world, but few other tournaments have the same clout. However, the size and novelty of those early runs of the Colossus meant that the final table was in a similar kind of spotlight.

The two winners of those first two events, Cord Garcia in 2015 and Ben Keeline in 2016, both rose to prominence following their wins.

Attendance numbers for the Colossus declined after the initial novelty of the tournament wore off. The 2018 and 2019 events saw their fields drop 40% from the initial record-breaking numbers of 2015. That didn’t mean the Colossus had been a failure, however. The World Series of Poker was reinventing itself.

The Colossus is Upstaged by the Events it Helped Create

In a sense, the Colossus in that period was a victim of its own success. Beginning in 2018, the WSOP decided to offer more low buy-in events like the Colossus to capitalize on its appeal with casual players. Some of those efforts were more explicit than others: 2018 saw the introduction of “The Giant,” a sort of mini-Colossus with a $365 buy-in.

In 2019, the Colossus saw its field-size record fall to one of the tournaments it helped to produce. “The Big 50” was the WSOP’s 50th anniversary event with a Colossus-like $500 price tag. It bested the inaugural Colossus by 27%, drawing an unbelievable 28,371 entries.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought live poker to a screeching halt in 2020. Even after casinos reopened, live poker numbers across the globe remained low for several years, as many people continued to shun big crowds. The Colossus was particularly slow to recover, since the size of the crowd had been its selling point.

In 2021, for the second time, it was only the second-largest event of the series. The $500 Reunion, celebrating the return of the live series, bested it by more than 3,000 entries. By 2022, the Colossus had slipped to third place. That year, it was eclipsed by both the $500 Housewarming and the brand new Million-Dollar Bounty, despite that tournament’s $1,000 price tag.

Numbers for the Colossus have been higher again in recent years—not as high as its first runs, but comparable to 2017. However, it’s now just one big tournament among several, unique only in its historical importance.

How Deepstacks Became Bracelet Events

The Colossus was the first sub-$1,000 bracelet event. However, the WSOP has been running Daily Deepstack side events since 2010 as a more affordable option for those unable or unwilling to pony up four figures.

At the time, the perception was that anything under $1,000 wasn’t serious enough to be worthy of a bracelet. However, the Colossus and the events it inspired have normalized the idea of more affordable bracelet events. Perhaps as a result, the WSOP has added multiple sub-$1,000 Deepstack events to the main schedule. The Daily Deepstacks continue in parallel to these, at an even lower $250 price point.

With the proliferation of so many smaller buy-in events, it’s not hard to see why the Colossus isn’t as colossal as it used to be. In 2025, there are ten events out of the 100 bracelet event schedule with a buy-in measured in hundreds.

The novelty factor of the Colossus may have worn off, but it remains an iconic staple event of each year’s schedule. Although some of these other affordable events are now upstaging it, they owe their existence to that 2015 effort, which paved the way and made the WSOP an experience for all budgets.