I shouldn't have left Sexton off my list. I liked his announcing and it was no doubt a big part of the boom.

the people who fund the ecosystem

The person (a prop/host named Dave Simon) who created a no limit structure for card rooms with a buy in cap. I believe this was around 2002 (just before Moneymaker's win) in a Los Angeles area casino (At the time Hawaiian Gardens now called "The Gardens). It took the fear out of playing no limit and led to quick expansion of the game.

hell no

=)

hell no
Its a great story, but it didn't impact poker as much as people say it did. The internet caused the boom and UIEGA in 2006 followed by Black Friday in 2011 shrunk the market. These things were responsible for the largest changes in poker. I would venture to say that perhaps whoever was responsible for getting poker on ESPN was/is the most important person in poker.


I agree with mason

That helps but it wasnt it




I have been around poker for over 20 years, and I was lucky enough to play online in 2006, and lucky enough to play at casinos in 2005.

The most important people in poker bar none are the creators of twoplustwo. Without them none of this would have been possible. Perhaps another site would have done what they did, but perhaps not as well.

After yang won basically all the WSOP winners were online crushers. If you beat poker online there was a 95% chance that twoplustwo was involved, or that you used a forum which copied twoplustwo. The creators of twoplustwo created a space where information was shared, and this information allowed its users to play more poker. Two plus two acts like a safe haven society for poker players. There is no other place like it or as invaluable of a resource. The amount of exponential growth that 2p2 has contributed to poker WORLD WIDE is close to immeasurable.

In a distant second is Phil Ivey due to his Full Tilt poker commercials that were all over TV, his 10 bracelet dominance, beating the casinos for tens of millions at baccarat, beating Andy Beal, and beating no home jerome, high stakes poker appearances and epic cash game wins. my boss in 2004 used to tell me about ivey in 2004 and she was a christian white lady who liked his headphones and his "great poker face"

in a very close 2nd or 3rd you have doug polk. Doug Polk ironically also used twoplustwo as a resource throughout his career. He is responsible for making basic poker theory known throughout the english speaking poker world. He is responsible for making the best and largest card room in texas. He arguable has the best poker training site in the world. The amount of people that doug polk has helped via his card room and online poker training site is immense. You could say doug polk helps keep hundreds of poker players fed and he feeds the families of people around the world. I am not exaggerating here; doug polks businesses affect many many many people and he usually benefits them in a positive way. Additionally doug polk made poker entertaining on youtube. Polker news was/is fantastic.

anyway if you disagree with me Id love to hear it on the basis of numbers.

after typing all of that up I would say its a coin toss between doug and 2p2 creators, with ivey in third

The Raymer impact was not permanent in the sense that people are still talking about him as they do with Moneymaker. But when it happened it was very strong.

Mason

There may be something that you're missing Poker needs regular players to help start games and keep games going. This means, in my opinion, that those who read and study books, probably put in many more hours than those who don't. This makes the correlation between book sales and the success of poker higher, again in my opinion, than you may think.

Mason

Spraggy ainec

I won't get too specific on sales data since by doing that it can indicate to some degree how much each author made, and that information is private in my opinion.

However, I will say a couple of things. We've sold over 2,500,000 books. Our best year was 2005 when we sold 436,000 books. And we have a bunch of books whose sales were over 200,000 copies and a couple which exceeded 300,000.

By the way, I've estimated that we have packed and shipped about 250 tons of books, and while we did have a full time book packer, I spent many, many hours helping out. It was quite an experience.

Mason

Somehow I see Doyle Brunson as the most important. Brought the intellect into poker, showed you can win with his book.

While am a Moneymaker fan and think he has been an excellent poker ambassador l, those saying it was his any man image that started the boom, who won in 2002? Was another any man but not same time. Not same story. Not same name.

Many good contributors here but I don’t think online booms wo a boom in live tournaments. Live tournaments doesn’t boom wo hole cam or similar. Wo hole cards watching poker is boring.

Does Ray Bitar belong on the list? I know he is very controversial and I know Full Tilt blew up but while FTP was going strong they did huge amounts of advertising that brought loads of people into poker

Why not Russ Hamilton?

I'm assuming Super System is the best-selling poker book of all time? I'm typing this post from a Barnes & Noble, and the only poker books available at this particular location are Super System and Caro's Book of Tells (along with Molly's Game and a book written by a guy who claims to have had the idea for 'Rounders' stolen from him). I'm responsible for around 1/500,000th of your total sales, heh--Theory of Poker, Psychology of Poker, a couple of the Harrington books, and Collin Moshman's book on SNG strategy

Somebody recently nominated Doyle in this thread, and he has to be near the top of the list (if we're not confining our discussion to the living)

Another controversial add to list list could be Shana Hiatt. She was the hostess for the WPT when it first got started and she was gorgeous. I am sure she was a factor in many people tuning into the WPT each week.

Moneymaker was the first main event champion who qualified through an online satellite. That was the big story about his win. A guy became poker world champion after paying $39 for his ticket. That's something that's achievable for almost every adult in the US. Buying into the tournament for $10k wasn't. (the inflation calculator says that's almost $17k in 2024)

Robert Varkonyi was an investment banker from New York with a degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Not sure if that qualifies as "any man".

The two go hand-in-hand. Televised poker would not have taken off if not first for the hole card cam.

I always compare the poker boom to the Fire Triangle: to sustain a fire, you need fuel, heat and oxygen. Take any one of those three things away, and the fire goes out. When it came to the poker boom, the popularity of poker television was the fuel, and I consider online poker to be the oxygen. I guess that makes Moneymaker the spark that ignited everything†. And sure, it's altogether possible that I've incorrectly assigned the different parts of the analogy. The larger point is that you needed all three parts to really have a boom.

By the way, did Orenstein invent the "lipstick camera" specifically? When I think of the lipstick camera, I think of the little tiny cameras that get embedded into the rail, like we saw in the 2003 WSOP telecasts. Looking at Figure 2 of his patent (PDF), it appears he invented the predecessor: a relatively large camera affixed to the underside of the table, shooting off a mirror through the little window cut out of the felt. This is the version we all saw in early seasons of High Stakes Poker or, before that, Late Night Poker.

Anyway, I don't want to take away from Orenstein's contribution, as it's quite likely that televised poker needed his invention first before we could move on to more innovative versions of it. I'm not sure if anyone would have developed the RFID readers if the original mirror/window contraption didn't take off a decade-plus before.

Moneymaker had the perfect name and perfect timing and like you said is a phenomenal poker ambassador.
Varkoni also got in on a 1 table 1000 dollar satelite at binions. Moneymaker got in for 40 bucks or so on pokerstars. That's a much better selling point for anyone who thinks they can instantly become a "pro."

And that's the thing. Around that time for a couple of years almost everyone playing thought they could be a pro poker player. that was the dream.

Today sure you have a few delusional people with no ability who think they can be pros. But mostly the aspiring pros are buying training courses, grinding solves etc. It's a totally different thing.

Yes, Moneymaker had a different story...thus why I said so. But as far a poker goes Varkonyi was an any man.

The point is that much of Moneymaker was the timing. Yes his story was better. Yes he was (or became) a better player, yes V was not as easy to root for. So no way to definitively say what happens if they switched places in time.

My real point though is it would not matter w/o seeing hole cards, Moneymaker doesn't matter. Poker never goes main stream w/o hole cards

Alec Torrelli

It's Isai Scheinberg not Is(a)iah. And the answer is Henry Orenstein. I started playing poker after watching the first WPT on Travel Channel all the way back in 2003. Without a hole card cam the broadcast would be just as boring as old ESPN broadcasts of the WSOP and I'm sure I'd never have bothered to try playing. Poker boom never occurs without hole card cams.

Mason, you and David have been extremely important for poker, in the top ten.

treat 2p2 as one entity and what other single person/two people has done more for poker?

Another one that could be on the list is Anurag Dikshit. Dikshit was the software developer who created the software for PartyPoker. Party brought an enormous number of people to poker during the Boom years

And like Moneymaker, he had the name.

What really drove the explosive growth was ESPN coverage + hole card cameras.

Poker popularity judging by main event entries was steadily rising before 2003 so it certainly had some momentum and growth already which was contributed by a lot of different sources but it exploded in 2003 from tv coverage of it. This single event had much more impact than any individual player or poker site operator

I think Moneymaker's effect is being way overrated, just about anyone winning I think would have brought in similar numbers. Like it was mentioned Varkonyi was an amateur who won a satellite as well (although a more expensive one). The $40 to millions was a pretty nice story, but not sure if it's really the reason that many people started playing, I personally anyway didn't start with the idea to win millions, it just seemed like a fun game and I wanted to try it. I could see the draw for some people though.

Massive amount of new people started playing poker because of his name? really? I guess Tennis and Baseball are praying someone with the last name Ballhitter wins a championship to take their games to the next level! Maybe he got a bit more exposure than most wsop winners in the media for it but that's about it. Moneymaker was a great story and all, but I was more drawn to the other more colorful characters like Farha, Nguyen, Vahedi, Ivey etc. Moneymaker wasn't nearly as exciting or watchable as many of the live pros from that era and don't think he was as big a draw in subsequent TV shows.

For me anyway I saw the 2003 WSOP on tv and it was the first time I'd actually seen poker played. I'd never played it before so it was a brand new game and looked like a ton of fun. Previous main events except for 2002 didn't have whole cards and even today going back and watching those are painful, you have no idea what's happening and half the time they don't even go to showdown and you have no idea what happened. It was basically unwatchable, and with the advent of the card camera it made the game very exciting and you could follow the action, bluffs, value bets in real time. I never started playing poker to win millions, I just thought it looked like a really fun game.

ESPN also seemed to broadcast the WSOP way more this year than previous years. Pretty much everyone I knew from around that time and myself had a similar story, we saw poker on TV typically either through the WSOP coverage or WPT coverage, it looked like fun, we wanted to try it out so we played with friends or online. I never heard anyone saying they loved Chris Moneymaker and wanted to be just like him, but plenty of people admired or talked about Ivey, Negreanu, Doyle, Ferguson, Gus, Hellmuth. They later found 2+2, poker books, training sites, and other poker related things. These all of course kept people interested and probably grew their interest in poker but the real thing that made them interested in the first place was televised poker. The one exception to this that had mainstream appeal is Rounders and Bond movies that probably brought some people in for the first time.

Anyway I'd give my vote to someone at the WSOP/WPT that created it in the first place or kept it relevant until the hole card camera like Binion. Either that or the hole card camera creator or whoever at ESPN/Travel network put it on TV in the first place.