GL Isai

Most certainly a plea deal was reached prior to boarding the plane so it's a near certainty that the punishment will be monetary and minimal in relation to his wealth.

Considering the punishments of others in this industry I feel a state dinner and keys to the DOJ office is a fair punishment.
I wish him the best of luck.

guy starts a business in his basement in 2000.

stays private and 14 years later sells it for 4.9 babillion. unreal. someone plz share another example of this feat in the business world.

never heard anyone who knows him say anything other than what josem mentioned.

mad props.

kinda funny you read that whole article and at the end almost in passing it says oh and btw they are "very close" to a settlement with the basic terms agreed upon. Kind of telling especially since the guy came voluntarily.

The Scheinbergs are some of the few good guys in this business, +1 on GL Isai

I'm not disagreeing with you that it's an incredible feat, but since you asked...

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple computer out of Jobs' bedroom and later the garage of his parents' house by making about 200 Apple I computers. Four years later at 25 years old, Jobs was worth over $250 million. Estimates of his net worth at the time of his death in 2011 range from 7 to 10 billion dollars.

Jobs... qft. total beast. dude envisoned and brought to existence consumer tech future

smartphone
music streaming

technoloigy GOAT without quetion. but AAPL went pubic

Isai stayed prviate till the 4 babiliion liquidity event. unprecedented

either way. if the main comp to your business success is Jobs..your in good company.

Ive always respected Isai. He provided the best product a poker player could hope for. I pray for a complete exoneration of whatever charges are brought. Unlikely, however.

It will probably be a money-grab type settlement. Either way Isai was a pioneer and visionary for poker. Its too bad that politics played dirty tricks on the game instead of helping it become legitimate and more secure.

Off the top of my head - Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit (although founders sold early).

EDIT: I do see your point though. My memory is hazy as it was a few years ago now, but I seem to remember that the Stars sale was the largest cash-only acquisition since the GFC. That's quite something.

Mark Cuban started broadcast.com with a $3k loan in his parents garage.

Yahoo knocked on his door and offered almost $6B for it.

+1, never forget. In an industry filled with scumbags, he made a profit with integrity. I hope everything goes well for him.

Oh yea...

If Trump got Pokerstars back in the States he'd be guaranteed to be re-elected. I'd rather see this than WEED Legalization.

More like lol, "poker hall of fame"... i probably have stuff laying around in my toilet that he gives more f`s about than the hof.

It's not quite the same thing since Isiah built pokerstars from nothing but of the top of my head 1 of the closest comparisons is the Fertita brothers buying the UFC for less then 1 million dollars then building it to what it is today and selling it couple years ago for 4.6 billion

Hell no i'm from australia and have been playin poker especially online since before the boom and look forward to online poker beoming legal again here but the legalisation of marijuana is far more important and will have a more positive impact on so many people lives then online poker will.

For what it's worth, part of PTLou's admiration of PokerStars is that it stayed private for so long. Broadcast.com (or Audionet, as it was originally named) was purchased within a few years after its inception.

Both are still impressive cases of entrepreneurship, though. No doubt about it.

By the way, I saw an article a little while back about how staying private got trendy a few times in recent years: once around the dot-com bubble, and another right before the financial crisis of 2008. In almost any other time, the words "going public" was pretty much synonymous with "we made it." This article came out well before the whole WeWork thing – probably around the time of Facebook's IPO. (Too lazy to look for it.)

Thus, I often wonder if PokerStars' staying private was a result of timing. The first major rumblings of a possible IPO took place in mid-2006 – right before the UIGEA. Others could probably weigh in on that, though.

Either way, I'm curious to see what is entailed in the "agreement in principle" that Olga Zverovich mentioned. I like what Josem said in that Tweet about Scheinberg being exonerated. Fingers crossed.

Yes, because online poker players make up such a huge voting bloc.

This being a swing issue would maybe make up what, 15 really dumb people in the entire USA?
You would have to have:
1. Not voted for Trump last election
2. Believe a "promise" from Trump
3. Vote for him rather than the candidate offering to erase your medical/education costs.

Maybe two dozen people are low info enough to fall into this list?

So many mixed feelings on this. Those of us who played on PokerStars following the 2006 UIGEA owe so much to Isai Scheinberg and the team/talent/corporate backbone he put in place.

The care that PokerStars put into their online poker product, the attention to detail, the investment into growing the market, the opportunity that PokerStars legitimacy brought to not only pro poker players and ambassadors but also to nitbags like myself who were able to seamlessly transition into virtual assistant gigs (for me it was January 2008) due to derivative/downstream businesses that were able to budget for such jobs because the Scheinbergs/PokerStars created so much excitement about online poker... I don't know if that will ever be matched for peer-to-peer online gambling services again.

Many U.S. citizens remain who genuinely benefited from U.S. online poker from UIGEA to April 2011 and were able to "learn the ropes" of the industry within reasonable time frames and with adequate resources for hands-on training plus community building. And yes the majority of players were "net-depositors," and yes there were a few clear and very public responsible gaming/underage gambling issues that people in the industry were unqualified to prevent and completely caught off guard by at the time. But still, if I could point to select individuals/companies who "made" me as a poker contributor, Isai Scheinberg and PokerStars pre-2011 would be on that list.

On the other hand, the regulated iGaming industry of today continues to pay dearly for creating and brute-force marketing such a large, vociferous class of professional online poker players who don't fit into the "online casino business" as well as they did for globally-available, mass-traffic "poker only" sites. Many pro poker players (and even some poker writers) are extremely wary of traditional casino pit games and aren't big on co-promoting slots/etc because it's not in our DNA to do that.

This presents a scenario that is unfair for both pro players and online poker sites due to (arguably) irresponsible legacy marketing that left high-volume players hanging out on a limb when the "VIP Rewards" program (which ironically began just a few months after 2006 UIGEA and then-PartyPoker exited the U.S. market) was inevitably removed. Obviously the way that was done was horrible, but such a large scale program that subsidized a TON of "jobs" was never going to pass muster once "online casino" got tied into the business and governments/search engines began regulating while extracting value for market access.

Who knows what would've happened with U.S. online poker market share if old-school PartyPoker had toughed it out and continued servicing America following the UIGEA. But to this day, the way Isai Scheinberg's PokerStars completely dropped the ball on the U.S. lobbying front (mainly with misguided rhetoric and financing a "player advocacy" group that actively sought to solicit, control, and freeload off of goodwill) burned important bridges that U.S. online poker is still paying for politically today.

And that's not counting how upset rival companies (at least those that have yet to be absorbed?) remain about the marketing advantage PokerStars obtained by staying in the U.S. after the UIGEA. Or the legitimate "heat" that PokerStars' pre-BF "push" to gain entrance into the entire U.S. market brought -- commercially and regulatory.

Just like Mason said, I wish Isai well and am hopeful he and the federal government are able to sort out these criminal matters in a way that allows Isai (who's 73 now) to live out the rest of his days free from a jail cell and peacefully. There are many people involved in the regulated online casino/online sports betting industry today who owe much of the opportunity they have now to the experience they gained from the offshore U.S. online poker business before Black Friday.

-David

I've read and heard this many times before (probably most publicly, with Coren's statement back in the day) but what is often misunderstood is that the vast majority of people choosing to play a casino game for the first time will have a better chance of winning if they play roulette or BJ rather than poker. Aspiring poker enthusiasts often reject this assertion out of hand, or are in denial, but the game exists because people lose money and most lose it faster and harder at poker than at other casino games.

In b4 "but you CAN win at poker with enough study and effort"

This is a very very interesting take, one that I'm sure will not be popular but has certainly has some validity.

I don't think this is true - the public reporting on this says the opposite.
The reason to go public is to access the money available in public markets. In the last few years, there's been huge amounts of money in private markets (hello Vision Fund etc.) so there's been less need to do so. In the context of PokerStars having no real need to obtain financing to grow, and with no desire by the Scheinbergs to cash out until 2014, there was simply no need for them to go public.

Raising money privately is not the same as creating a liquidity event like an IPO or acquisition. Those are the main ways founders and other equity holders realise full value.

As Isai kept the company private for 14 years, he presumably didn't take the VC route in the early days. If he did, he would've been compelled to create a liquidity event like going public much earlier.

Having said that, I do remember hearing rumblings over Stars going public in 2006, but the UIGEA squashed those plans. Perhaps that indicates that he did take outside investment but market conditions prevented him from making bank earlier?

The Forbes article linked in the OP (quoted below) indicates that they have a plea deal largely in place according to one of the federal prosecutors.

DoJ press release, March 25, 2020: PokerStars Founder Pleads Guilty

QUOTE: SCHEINBERG pled guilty to one count of operating an illegal gambling business, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1955. SCHEINBERG faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on a date to be determined.

This sounds like a plea deal to me...........