![]() But it was the tournaments that made PokerStars a hit with players. PokerStars also offered traditional online poker tables, charging a commission fee for operating the games. The software that Scheinberg’s PYR developed was unique because it was designed for tournament play. Like many of their online gambling competitors, Mark Scheinberg initially set up shop in Costa Rica. So in 2001 Scheinberg and his son, Mark Scheinberg, decided to start their own company, PokerStars. In 2000, Scheinberg started PYR Software in Toronto to develop software for online poker companies, but he couldn’t get anyone in the nascent industry to license his software. Like many smart, numerate people of his generation, Scheinberg also liked to play poker, particularly in tournaments, even making an appearance at the 1996 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. A gifted computer programmer, Scheinberg played a key role in the development and adoption of the now universal Unicode computing standard that allows computers everywhere to process the world’s different languages. There, he fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and worked at IBM, eventually moving to its offices in Toronto. ![]() He grew up in Lithuania, earned a math master’s degree at Moscow State University, and bolted the Soviet Union by going to Israel. Howard Lederer, a famous professional poker player, helped run Full Tilt Poker, which was unable to repay $330 million of player deposits. The “Moneymaker effect” was apparent, but the man who helped make it happen remained anonymous. By 2006, 8,773 poker players were competing in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event and PokerStars had hosted 38 million online tournaments. Millions of Americans rushed onto the internet to try their hand at winning big cash. Moneymaker’s win sparked an online poker boom in the U.S. “This is beyond fairy tale,” ESPN commentator Norman Chad bellowed. ![]() Its broadcast of Moneymaker’s World Series of Poker run was as thrilling as any traditional sporting event. ESPN had started popularizing poker programming in 2002 by building a camera directly into the table so viewers could see players’ “hole” (or face down) cards. At Binion’s Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas, Moneymaker beat 838 other entrants, including the best poker players on the planet, to win the World Series of Poker’s Main Event and its $2.5 million purse. He won the tournament and its prize-a $10,000 seat at the World Series of Poker. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker, a regular 27-year-old guy who worked as an accountant in Tennessee, sat in his home one afternoon and entered an $86 online poker tournament hosted by a company based in Costa Rica called PokerStars. Scheinberg Sr.’s surrender to the authorities marks the end of one of the wildest sagas in internet history, when offshore companies of dubious legality raked in hundreds of millions in fees from everyday American Janes and Joes, who all thought for a minute they could make money online as poker stars. His son, Mark Scheinberg, went on to sell PokerStars for $4.9 billion in 2014 to a publicly traded company and Forbes estimates he is now worth $4.5 billion. But despite his help on the Full Tilt matter, federal prosecutors never gave up on going after Scheinberg.
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