The Magic of Moneymaker

As a college sophomore, Chris Moneymaker had learned how to bet on sports online. Less than six months later, he was up $60,000. Not too shabby for a kid from Tennessee. But then, in one drunken and destructive night, it was gone.

"It was my fraternity formal …" Moneymaker began the story with just a hint of sadness in his voice. For some inexplicable reason, he had convinced himself that it would be a good idea to wager the entire $60,000 on four different games.

"I got pretty inebriated that night," he said. "I wound up losing all four games and 60 grand."

Moneymaker has come a long way since that sophomoric night; so too has the poker industry he helped ignite with his improbable main-event win in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2003.

When Moneymaker won his $39 online satellite that paid his $10,000 buy-in into the main event, most people weren't even aware of the concept of an online satellite to get into a live poker tournament. But one historic victory and $2.5 million later, it has become the norm in the poker community.

Recently, 1,347 people competed in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure's $10,000 main event, creating the largest prize pool of any non-WSOP poker tournament. An incredible 1,061 of those 1,347 players qualified through online satellites on PokerStars.

In 2002, the site sent only two people to the WSOP main event. This past year, it awarded more than 2,000 seats. The notion of the online qualifier is, of course, just part of the effect Moneymaker has had on the game.

It's been more than five years since his WSOP win. Moneymaker has transformed from an anonymous accountant to a full-fledged celebrity, from a man in debt to a world-traveling millionaire. Poker has transformed from the devious game of gamblers to a mainstream phenomenon, from a game played in a smoke-filled room to a game played in the Rio's Penn and Teller Theater.

To quote Bob Dylan: The times they are a-changin'.

Poker Prepares for Lift-Off

By now, nearly every poker player knows Moneymaker's story. After his win, poker exploded - both online and live - and an industry that most people viewed suspiciously was thrust into the public eye.

"What Moneymaker meant to poker and to the world was that any person could do this," said Chris Capra, the director of Lotus Public Relations, the firm that handles PR for PokerStars in North America. "He wasn't the professional gambler. He wasn't the old gunslinger. But he took on this shadowy type of environment. He went against the best in the world and won."

Phil Hellmuth, the 11-time bracelet winner who had a reputation for selling himself long before Moneymaker arrived, was one of the players who had the most to gain from the game's newfound popularity.

"In 2002, you made all your money playing poker. Guess what? You didn't win every month," said Hellmuth, who says he has now made more money from endorsements and investments than the $10-plus million he has made from tournament poker. "It's a totally different era."

Hellmuth credits Moneymaker's name, his everyday profession, and the fact that he was from the South to the boom.

"Chris Moneymaker was a huge part of it, but he wasn't all of it," said Hellmuth. "The rise of the holecard camera, Internet poker, and Rounders all helped."

The 1998 movie Rounders inspired many people to take up the game after Matt Damon's character constantly reiterated throughout the film that poker was a game of skill, not luck. Moneymaker himself was convinced to give no-limit hold'em a try after watching the movie.

The holecard camera, which debuted in a 1999 British poker show, made its first appearance on ESPN in 2002. Henry Orenstein, who patented the game-changing device, was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame at the 2008 World Series.
Howard Lederer, a two-time bracelet winner, says three key factors are responsible for the poker boom: the fact that poker is an inherently great game, the accessibility of online poker, and the TV coverage, which he associates with the "Moneymaker Effect."

"If poker wasn't so incredibly fascinating, if it wasn't the greatest game on earth, people would've bored of it quickly and the whole thing would've boomed and fizzled really fast," said Lederer. "It was the Moneymaker Effect, but the Moneymaker Effect doesn't happen unless you have the first two."

Hellmuth and Lederer both agree that the convenience of online poker has helped the game tremendously.

"Poker has become accessible to a lot of remote regions where there are no casinos, to a lot of states that don't allow casinos, and to places where people would want to play poker but can't find a private game," said Hellmuth. "To all of those people, poker is six clicks away."

The Extent of the Moneymaker Effect

When Moneymaker won the main event in 2003, the world took notice. There was something about the Tennessee accountant that people identified with.

"People connected to him because he is that average guy," said Capra. "That's the magic of Moneymaker."

As a result of satellites to get into the main event, hundreds of thousands of people compete for a seat on poker's biggest stage for just a few dollars.

Moneymaker was one of 33 PokerStars qualifiers for the main event in 2003. That number increased to 316 in 2004, and it has continued to grow. This past year, PokerStars awarded 2,008 seats to the main event - 1,063 of which were actually used to play.

The WSOP and tournament fields in general exploded with the attention Moneymaker's win brought to poker. After a field of 839 players participated in the 2003 main event, more than triple that number, 2,576, showed up in 2004. That number grew to 5,619 players in 2005 and 8,773 players in 2006 before the U.S. government severely hindered poker's boom.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed in September 2006, prohibiting financial institutions from transferring funds to an online gambling site and making it that much more difficult for Americans to play online. Yet, online poker continues to grow, and the past two main events have attracted more than 6,000 players each.

The days of poker being just an American phenomenon are long gone. The 2008 World Series of Poker welcomed players from 118 different countries and territories - considerably more than the 80 countries that were represented in the last Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, in 2006. PokerStars has created the European Poker Tour, the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, and the Latin American Poker Tour to feed the growing international appetite for the game.

In late December, PokerStars set a Guinness World Record for the largest online poker tournament with 35,000 players in a single tournament. This was part of a "World Record Week" promoted by the site that included the largest-ever Sunday Warm-up tournament with 5,836 players and the largest Sunday Million tournament with 16,260 players.

While there are millions of people playing the game for fun, it is estimated that tens of thousands of people make their living because of the poker industry, and we're not just talking about the professional player.

"Dealers, floorpeople, programmers, Web designers, even people putting poker books into packages … You start adding it all up, and I don't think 15,000 is a stretch," said Lederer. He estimates that an additional 10,000 to 30,000 people grind out a living playing the game.

The poker explosion has created new jobs, new careers, and a number of new millionaires. Inevitably, people look back at Chris Moneymaker as the man who made it happen.

Moneymaker: Then and Now

"I like to think I'm the same guy today as I was back then," said Moneymaker, hoping the money and recognition he has received from his historic victory hasn't profoundly affected who he is. But his life is hardly the same.

Back then, he was a struggling gambler with thousands of dollars of debt, just trying to keep his head above water. He was losing money betting on sports and very rarely came out ahead when he visited a casino.

"Thank God I had a pretty good-paying job as an accountant," Moneymaker said. "It kept me afloat."

But after $39 became $2.5 million, he didn't have to worry about bills or a 9-to-5 job. Today, he travels the world - from the Bahamas to Monte Carlo, from London to Rio de Janeiro, from Costa Rica to Macao - supporting his family and representing the site he helped make famous. The site pays for Moneymaker's traveling expenses and tournament fees, and he gets to keep 100 percent of his winnings.

While this may seem like every poker player's dream, it takes its toll on Moneymaker.

"It's tough on the family," said Moneymaker, who has two daughters with his wife, Christy, and one daughter from a previous marriage. Although he plays in only about 12 tournaments a year, many of them are overseas, and between the travel time and everything else, he's often away from his young daughters for more than a week at a time.

"Our oldest daughter, who is now three and a half, doesn't quite understand, so she gets upset now when he leaves, because he's gone for seven or nine days at a time," said Christy. "It's quite hard on our family."

She wishes he would cut back on the number of international tournaments he plays in.

Moneymaker says that he expects to be playing the game professionally for at least another 10 years, but not indefinitely.
"It does get old," he said. "I don't see how these other guys can play tournament after tournament, and play consistently. It's tough."

The expectations also wear on Moneymaker. After his 2003 win, many critics dismissed him as a one-win fluke. He quieted many of his adversaries for a while with a second-place finish in a World Poker Tour event in 2004 for $200,000, but he has yet to win that second major tournament.

He knows that most people aren't impressed with final-table appearances.

"It's not a win, and that's what people care about," he said.

However, Moneymaker will be the first to say that there are more pros than cons to his life in poker.

"I know I make money. That's all that matters. I support my family," he said.

The 2003 main-event champ also tries to do his part to give back to the community. This past year, he flew 24-year-old Donald Hobbs to Las Vegas and paid his entry into the WSOP main event. Hobbs had gotten into a terrible car accident in February 2007, and his doctors didn't think he would survive because of his hemophilia - a disease that makes it difficult for the body to control blood-clotting.

But against all odds, Hobbs did survive. Slowly but surely, he started to get better, thanks to his occupational therapist Michele Rose, who used poker to get Hobbs active.

When Moneymaker found out that he was Hobbs' favorite poker player, he flew to his Ohio hospital to meet him. There, he told Hobbs that if he got better, he would take him to the World Series. Moneymaker not only kept his word, but did things one better by taking care of Hobbs' buy-in for the main event. The Kentucky native sat at the same table as Hellmuth, before busting out on the last hand of day 1.

What's Next for Poker?

If you had told someone in 2002 that professional poker players would be more widely recognized than professional athletes, you most likely would've gotten a skeptical response. The fact that poker has completely reinvented itself in the past five years makes it that much more difficult to predict how much the industry will change in the coming years.

But Lederer and other pros are optimistic that contrary to some people's opinions that poker has peaked, the game is poised to reach new heights.

"The international thing is just happening," said Lederer. "It's going to grow internationally, and it's going to grow quite a bit." He cited Italy, France, Russia, Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries as the newest launching points for the game.

Lederer is also a member of the board of directors for the Poker Players Alliance, a nonprofit member organization whose mission is to "establish favorable laws that provide poker players with a secure, safe, and regulated place to play."

"If poker is going to explode again in the U.S., it's going to happen if some levelheaded, appropriate, good government legislation is passed in the next couple years, and I'm very hopeful," said Lederer. "If legislation like that is passed, I would predict that we'd have more than 20,000 people in the World Series of Poker main event within five years."

Jamie Gold won $12 million in 2006 after he outlasted a tournament field of 8,773 players. If Lederer's prediction comes true, a player could make upward of $25 million-$30 million for first place in the WSOP main event.

What would Moneymaker, the man who started it all, do if he beat all odds and won it again? For one, he'd play less poker.
"I'd probably scale it back," said Moneymaker, of his tournament schedule. He says it's hard to know for sure to what extent, though.

Christy isn't nearly as uncertain. She says, emphatically, "I'd let him play one tournament a year."