Chris Moneymaker Ten Years After the Boom

You’ve heard the story a dozen times before. A 27-year-old accountant from Tennessee wins his World Series of Poker main event seat in a $39 online satellite and parlays it into a $2.5 million payday by beating the world’s best players in Las Vegas.

His name is Chris Moneymaker, and because of his everyman persona and storybook name, he is widely credited for being one of the catalysts that launched the poker boom.

“The world realized that anybody could do it,” said World Poker Tour Commentator Mike Sexton. “Chris has been a great ambassador for the game and was really one of the early pioneers for online poker. In a way, he helped to bridge the gap between the online and live tournament worlds.”

Fellow PokerStars spokesman Daniel Negreanu echoed Sexton’s sentiment.

“He wasn’t a professional,” said Negreanu. “Other than his cool last name, he didn’t really get a lot of attention until the tournament was almost over. This was a guy who turned a PokerStars satellite into $2.5 million. There are millions of African-Americans out there who now dream of becoming President of the United States, just because Obama did it. It was the same thing when Chris won the main event. There were millions of casual players out there who all of a sudden dreamed of becoming the world champion.”

But while the rest of the world jumped on the bandwagon and pushed the level of poker higher, Moneymaker admitted he rode his new fame and fortune into a mediocre comfort zone.

After a timely wake up call, Moneymaker rediscovered his passion for the game and devoted himself to improving. The studying paid off and his game has never been better, though if it was up to Moneymaker, he’d prefer nobody knew about his newfound poker prowess.

It’s been a decade since the world’s most famous amateur poker player won the main event. Recently, Moneymaker sat down with Card Player to discuss his outlook on the past, present and future.

Julio Rodriguez: How much credit do you give yourself for the poker boom?

Chris Moneymaker: I give myself no credit whatsoever. It was just a case of being at the right place at the right time. The only thing that I did was be myself. The broadcast accurately portrayed me as just an everyday, normal guy and not some shrewd professional poker player and, for whatever reason, that seemed to resonate with people. I like being the guy people feel they can approach or get a beer with and ever since I won, I’ve tried to keep that mentality.

JR: You travel all over the world on the tournament circuit. Do you see a lot of yourself in the poker community?

CM: In the poker community, yes, I see a lot of myself. Maybe not at the elite levels where the sharpest players in the world are, but in the neighborhood home games, or the $1-$2 game at the casino, there are plenty of Chris Moneymakers out there.

JR: Does that make you feel like an outsider in the pro community?

CM: There are definitely cliques in poker, but no, I don’t feel like an outsider. My game has improved to the point where I feel I can compete with anybody. More importantly, I’m confident in my abilities and I no longer feel like I’m trying to play catch up.

JR: Can you talk about your development as a player after you won the WSOP in 2003?

CM: After winning the main event, I spent the next five or six months believing that I was this incredible, untouchable player. I played in a WPT event and I took second. I was riding high and thought I had everything figured out. Fast forward a few years, and things weren’t going nearly as well. I started blaming my lack of success on the bad beats and the suckouts.

In 2009, I finally took a good, objective look around the table and I realized that everyone was playing differently than me. I hadn’t been keeping up with the evolution of the game. I had gotten complacent. What’s funny is that in 2003, I had always been the guy who laughed at the regulars who had been there for 15 years and never bothered to improve. Then I became that person. I saw the game changing, but I was never convinced that I had to change with it. People were all of a sudden four and five-betting light, and I couldn’t defend against it. I didn’t even know what the concept of a polarized bet was.

Instead of continuing to make excuses, I made the decision to really try and improve. That was probably the biggest eye-opening experience for me, because I had no idea how far behind the curve I had fallen. From 2003 to 2009, the level of poker play had risen through the roof. When all of this sank in, I was furious with myself and did everything I could to not be that guy anymore.

JR: In the 2003 WSOP you were the chip leader with ten players remaining. You flopped trips with A-Q and Phil Ivey turned a full house with his pocket nines. You had seven outs to take out the most dangerous player at table and it happened when an ace hit the river. If you don’t fill up on that hand and the best player in the world goes on to win the biggest tournament in the world, does the poker boom happen that year?

CM: I think the boom was going to happen regardless, simply because of online poker and the popularity of poker on television. But it probably wouldn’t have been quite as large. The idea that anybody can jump in with the pros and win the biggest event of the year really took hold of people. This was something that you couldn’t ever do with any other televised sport. People didn’t see me up there winning, they were envisioning themselves up there.

JR: What are the biggest misconceptions people have about you?

CM: There are two misconceptions when people think about me. The first is they think that I’m broke. The second is they think that I’m a horrendous poker player. It used to really bother me, but now I’ve embraced that reputation. If I had it my way, people would think I’m a terrible player for the rest of my career. There are games that start around me, just because people want to tell their friends that they beat me in a pot. Now, I’ll sit down at a $5-$10 game and people just assume that I won’t take it seriously. The truth is I have no problem taking someone’s money at any stakes.

People are also really polarized when they play against me, because they want to take home a story. So it’s up to me to determine if they are there to play tight and solid, hoping to tell their friends that they beat me, or if they are there to play wild and reckless, hoping to tell their friends that they bluffed me out of a pot. Once I figure out what category someone falls in, poker becomes really easy. Other than the money, winning the WSOP pays off over your lifetime just in reputation and the gifts players give you at the table because of their own ego.

JR: Can you talk about your relationship with PokerStars?

CM: When I first won the WSOP, PokerStars came to me and expressed an interest in having me be a spokesperson for the site. At the time, they basically said, “Well, we really don’t know what to pay you, because really, there isn’t anybody else out there in your situation.” As a result, the first deal I got wasn’t too good of a deal. This wasn’t anybody’s fault. The concept of a site spokesperson just didn’t exist yet. Nobody really knew what kind of work was involved. The contract was for something like three or four years, but at a relatively low rate. After the first year, PokerStars had really blown up and the site was bigger than ever. They could have told me to go pound salt, but to their credit, they instantly offered to renegotiate and make things right. They’ve treated me great for the last decade and I’m proud to say I represent the PokerStars product. There’s a reason why they’re known as the best poker site in the world.

JR: Do you think there will ever be another poker boom like there was a decade ago?

CM: It won’t happen again, at least not at that level. An amateur winning the main event won’t do anything. A woman winning the main event, that’s not going to do anything either. The only thing that will bring us even close to the same boom we had ten years ago is federal legalization of online poker. Even then, we’re only talking about the United States. It’s an important market, if not the most important market, but the game is still growing all over the world regardless.

The biggest argument from online poker advocates is that legislators can’t possibly ignore the market, because there is way too much money to be made by taxing it. Well, if that was true, then they certainly would have already legalized sports betting at the federal level, because that market is ten times bigger. The only real argument that the poker community has is that it’s a game of skill. That’s where our hope lies. Doing it state by state is a good start, but it’s not enough. If you leave it up to the state, then my home state of Tennessee will never have online poker in my lifetime. It’s just not going to happen.

JR: How have you changed over the last ten years?

CM: My wife might disagree with me, but I’m way more responsible now. I was a big partier and would get hammered almost every night. I was real lackadaisical about my responsibilities and sometimes I’d blow off interviews or appearances. These days, I drink a hell of a lot less and I make sure that all of my obligations are met. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. ♠