History Of Poker Until Now

The timeline and history of poker industry events since the “Chris Moneymaker boom” may not show the same growth it did in the early years after Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, but poker events are still larger and more lucrative than they ever were before Moneymaker’s landmark success. Chris Moneymaker is credited with democratizing poker, giving a whole generation of guys sitting behind a computer screen the belief that they could make a fortune by beating the poker professionals at their own game.

When Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP Main Event, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Many factors explain why the poker boom happened after Moneymaker’s big victory. The online poker industry was ready for a boom, as poker software development and high-speed Internet access had reached a stage where playing poker on the home computer was becoming commonplace.

Also, ESPN had been covering the World Series of Poker for a number of years, but the 2003 event featured hole-card cameras to better show the strategy behind card playing, along with the snappy made-for-tv one-liners of Norman Chad. Poker on television had reached a point where it was interesting to players and non-players alike, because it was well-produced, edited into highlights, and had a running narration. ESPN was able to show the characters–and bring out the character–of the players involved.

But poker still needed a poster boy. While the World Series of Poker had plenty of stars and plenty of characters, big personalities like Phil Hellmuth were obnoxious to most viewers and great players like Phil Ivey were still professionals and insiders.

Chris Moneymaker was none of those things.

Moneymaker was an average guy from Tennessee who was in Las Vegas because he’d won a $39 qualifier on Pokerstars. Pokerstars was sending a lot of players to the World Series of Poker as a form of advertising, and their saturation of the tournament helped increase the odds an average Joe winning the event (while wearing the Pokerstars logo). It didn’t hurt that Chris’s surname, “Moneymaker”, was straight out of Hollywood.

The time was right, the coverage was right, the story was bound to strike a nerve with mainstream America, and the personality was both average and identifiable at the same time.

The World Poker Tour

The World Poker Tour takes a lot of credit for starting the “poker boom”. The WPT first aired on the Travel Channel in 2002. While the WPT wasn’t the first to air poker on television, the World Poker Tour was the first to offer the camera shot revealing players’ cards. This gave the viewer something to concentrate on and insight into what was coming, adding natural suspense. The introduction of poker personalities into the broadcast also created buzz. Though ESPN had been covering the World Series of Poker years earlier, much of the coverage the mainstream viewer saw in the 2003 WSOP broadcasts were influenced by the World Poker Tour.

Chris Moneymaker Wins the WSOP

When Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, a wider audience began to take notice. Moneymaker outplayed a number of professional players, included the well-respected Sam Farha, heads-up at the final table. Chris Moneymaker had the big stack and used it well, but there were moments Sam Farha could have called a bluff and put Moneymaker in a bad spot.

Over the course of the next year, ESPN broadcast replays of the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, so millions of cable viewers watched as Chris Moneymaker demonstrated that an accountant from nowhere could beat the best players in the poker world. The next year’s WSOP Main Event showed the influence of that win.

World Series of Poker Field – Since Moneymaker Boom

Here is the yearly size of the WSOP Main Event since Chris Moneymaker won the tournament in 2003. I should mention that the 2003 event had a record turnout until that point, so the era where thousands of poker players flock to Las Vegas to plop down their $10,000 for a shot at global fame and multi-million dollars in cash coincides with Chris Moneymaker’s win.

1. 2003 WSOP Main Event – 839 Entrants – Chris Moneymaker
2. 2004 WSOP Main Event – 2,576 Entrants – Greg Raymer
3. 2005 WSOP Main Event – 5,619 Entrants – Joe Hoachem
4. 2006 WSOP Main Event – 8,773 Entrants – Jamie Gold
5. 2007 WSOP Main Event – 6,358 Entrants – Jerry Yang
6. 2008 WSOP Main Event – 6,844 Entrants – Peter Eastgate
7. 2009 WSOP Main Event – 6,494 Entrants – Joe Cada
8. 2010 WSOP Main Event – 7,319 Entrants – Jonathan Duhamel
9. 2011 WSOP Main Event – 6,865 Entrants – Pius Heinz

Greg Raymer Wins 2004 World Series of Poker

The next year’s event saw Greg “Fossil-Man” Raymer win the event in the first year that the champion had to beat a field with thousands of players. Greg Raymer’s victory should not be underrated, because in many ways it confirmed in the public mind that average guys could win poker’s biggest event. People could say Chris Moneymaker was a fluke, but when an unknown won the event the very next year, that wasn’t as easy to do.

Like Moneymaker, Raymer won his way into the field through Pokerstars. Also like Moneymaker, Raymer was an anonymous player before the tournament who defeated several of the best and most famous player’s on his way to the final table. Note that the field more than doubled again after Raymer’s 2004 victory.

World Poker Tour Player of the Year

The World Series of Poker became a major television ratings success for ESPN, but these events were tape-delayed and only shown over a short run-though reruns made the WSOP omnipresent on ESPN for a few years. For those poker fans who wanted a weekly fix, the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel was the pinnacle of tv entertainment.

In this way, the WPT became the flagship program for tv poker, driving a big part of the Moneymaker boom. Viewers could watch the yearly chase to see who won Player of the Year on the WPT, a sign that a player was the best poker player in the world that year, despite whoever won the single WSOP Main Event–seen by many insiders in the wake of the Moneymaker win as more luck than skill.

1. WPT Player of the Year Season 1 – 2002-03 – Howard Lederer
2. WPT Player of the Year Season 2 – 2003-04 – Erick Lindgren
3. WPT Player of the Year Season 3 – 2004-05 – Daniel Negreanu
4. WPT Player of the Year Season 4 – 2005-06 – Gavin Smith
5. WPT Player of the Year Season 5 – 2006-07 – J. C. Tran
6. WPT Player of the Year Season 6 – 2007-08 – Jonathan Little
7. WPT Player of the Year Season 7 – 2008-09 – Bertrand Grospellier
8. WPT Player of the Year Season 8 – 2009-10 – Faraz Jaka
9. WPT Player of the Year Season 9 – 2010-11 – Andy Frankenberger

WPT Championships

The World Poker Tour ends every season with a $25,000 buy-in tournament that is considered the World Poker Tour World Championship. Here is the list of the winners of the WTP Championship. These players are considered the champions of the World Poker Tour for a year.

1. WPT Championship Season 1 – Alan Goehring
2. WPT Championship Season 2 – Martin De Knijff
3. WPT Championship Season 3 – Tuan Le
4. WPT Championship Season 4 – Joe Bartholdi Jr
5. WPT Championship Season 5 – Carlos Mortensen
6. WPT Championship Season 6 – David Chiu
7. WPT Championship Season 7 – Yevgeniy Timoshenko
8. WPT Championship Season 8 – David Williams
9. WPT Championship Season 9 – Scott Seiver

But the World Poker Tour wasn’t the only televised poker. Fox Sports had its weekly broadcasts and yearly events. NBC had Poker After Dark which ran late at night, as well as its Heads-Up Poker Championship between the best in the game. Even Bravo Channel got into the action, as it produced several seasons of Celebrity Poker. It seemed everyone had their own poker events in the wake of the Moneymaker boom.

Online Poker Events after the Moneymaker Boom

After the explosion of poker activity in the wake of Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 accomplishment, many people went online to emulate their working class poker hero. Online sites like Pokerstars, Party Poker, and Full Tilt Poker became household names with slick commercials, large weekly events, and huge prize pools. Online card rooms would have “guaranteed $200,000″ and “guaranteed million” events several times a week. The weekend poker tournaments were huge, and the big prize pools became weekly news items on every gambling website.

In many ways, this boom continued for up to 7 years in many parts of the world, as the online cardrooms outside the United States didn’t top out their prize pools until late 2009 and 2010. But inside America, the legal landscape was changing. New laws would quiet the Moneymaker boom in the United States after just 3 years. The 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event was a high water mark in the US gambling market. The decline was rapid with some operators, while slow and painful with others.

Jamie Gold Wins the Largest Poker Tournament Ever

When Jamie Gold won the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, he won what remains the largest big-stake poker tournament in history. With nearly 9,000 entrants in the field, talk that year was that the field would soon expand into the 5-digits. Professional poker players talked of never having a realistic chance of winning the WSOP Main Event again, due to the huge number of amateur contestants. That might remain the case, but the 10,000 entrant mark was never reached.

The prize pool for the 2006 WSOP Main Event was over $82,000,000, and Jamie Gold took home over $12,000,000 for his victory. It looked like the Moneymaker boom was nowhere near its peak. But the U.S. Congress changed that, bursting the 3-year bubble in the mass popularity of poker with the passage of UIGEA.

2006 UIGEA Act

A few months after Jamie Gold won the WSOP Main Event, the U.S. Congress passed a bill called the Safe Port Act. Though they had nothing to do with safe ports, anti-gambling laws were shoehorned into the legislation, making it illegal for many poker operators and electronic cash transfer companies to accept players from the United States. On September 30, 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed, making it illegal for Internet gambling operators to accept most forms of payment from U.S. players.

The effects on gambling in the United States weren’t immediate. Many online gambling operators got out of the business, while many gambling-support organizations like the electronic cash transfer companies and the poker software design companies left the US market. Many American poker players continued to play unhindered for many months after the UIGEA, but the writing was on the wall.

A few high profile legal cases were brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, while several cash services and casinos had their funds frozen. With players uncertain about seeing money if they won, many gamblers went away. The noose slowly tightened, so that fewer and fewer online sites would take US players.

This had a ripple effect on even the World Series of Poker. While the number of contestants still dwarfed what had attended 10 years earlier, the numbers of the high-water year of 2006 were never reached again.

World Series of Poker Europe

Starting in 2007, the World Series of Poker expanded its brand name into the European continent with its annual World Series of Poker Europe tournament. This 5-event tournament is seen as a chance to capitalize on the name of the world’s most famous poker tournament, but it’s also a testing of the waters due to the stringent anti-gambling laws in the United States. For example, the WSOP cannot allow players to advertise for online gambling companies at their Las Vegas events, but that isn’t the case with the WSOP Europe.

1. WSOPE Main Event 2007 – Thomas Bihl
2. WSOPE Main Event 2008 – John Juanda
3. WSOPE Main Event 2009 – Barry Shulman
4. WSOPE Main Event 2010 – James Bord
5. WSOPE Main Event 2011 – Elio Fox

Record Online Poker Tournaments

The largest online poker event ever was hosted by PokerStars in December 2009. This event had 149,196 players and awarded over $1,000,000 in prizes. The largest event by prize pool was the 2010 World Championship of Online Poker, also hosted by PokerStars, which offered up a record online prize pool of more than $12,200,000.

Black Friday – US Justice Department vs Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker

The huge profits continued for the real money poker sites like Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars into early 2011. On Friday, April 15, 2011, the FBI shut down the websites of Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker, and Pokerstars. Arrests were made by the FBI, working at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice, while indictments went out for many other online poker executives.

It was announced that Interpol would help with arrests and extradition. The day came to be known in the poker industry as Black Friday.

The details of the case are pending court action. The Justice Department accused the Internet cardrooms of defrauding investors and trying to get around U.S. gambling laws through secret arrangements with certain U.S. banks. Some of Full Tilt Poker’s celebrity poker owners were accused of accepting millions of dollars from the company that was earmarked for cash withdrawals from players. One U.S. official, perhaps misunderstanding the concept, called Full Tilt Poker a “ponzi scheme”.

In the wake of these events, it’s uncertain what future poker industry events will be like. One thing that is certain is the Chris Moneymaker boom is over, though it came to an end at different times in different places around the world. There seems to be a resurgence of poker, however, in certain European countries following legalization. This is the case with France, and their poker en argent réel, which is the term they use to designate real money poker. PokerArgentReel.fr states that poker has been the most popular of the legalized games in France. Sports Betting and Horse Racing operators have struggled to make a profit, but poker has been thriving. And in Germany, we are expecting the European version of the Chris Moneymaker Boom, since a German national citizen won this year. The timing is especially interesting because this win coincides with the soon-to-be legislation of the online poker games throughout the country. So we’ll keep you posed on the developments in the German market.