The Smoking Petition: How Tom McEvoy Helped the WSOP Become Smoke Free

Yori Epskamp

Level 6 : Blinds 400/800, 800 ante

One of the players in the field today is poker legend Tom McEvoy, who won the WSOP Main Event all the way back in 1983, conquering a final table that included the late Doyle Brunson who finished third. McEvoy was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2013.

At the time of writing, he's sitting with 88,000 in chips in his quest to win the Main Event a second time — which would be an incredible forty years after the first one. But did you know that McEvoy did something else? He was instrumental in turning the World Series of Poker into a smoke-free environment.

The 2023 World Series of Poker (WSOP) has been a record affair drawing tens of thousands of players. Now, imagine those players were allowed to smoke at the table? That used to be the case at the WSOP, but thanks to the efforts of McEvoy and associates Casey Kastle and Paul Ladanyi, that all changed.

Not only did the WSOP at Binion’s Horseshoe become smoke-free – the second-hand smoke there was often called the “Horseshoe Crud” – but for the most part, the entire poker tournament industry did.

That was thanks to the “Non-Smoking Tournament Petition,” which McEvoy and company circulated in 2001 and ultimately collected 522 signatures, including from some of the biggest names of the game.

Read the full story on PokerNews