Salon – The 2013 World Series of Poker Main Event opened to a pastiche of landmark tournament moments from the last decade starting with, of course, Chris Moneymaker’s serendipitous Main Event win in 2003. Moneymaker – a then 27-year-old poker hobbyist with an easy going countenance – won an online satellite tournament for a $10,000 entry fee to the Main Event, then navigated an 839 person field, “eliminating” various heady professional players on his way to a $2.5 million first place payday.
The “Moneymaker Effect” was poker-prozac and ESPN replayed the 2003 Main Event highlights in multiple-hour blocks at all times of day; making it feel like Moneymaker was ousting Las Vegas legends like the Great Johnny Chan, The Great Phil Ivey, and then in a final heads-up duel, the Great Sam Farha hundreds of times over.
The Worldwide Leader in Sports’ continual replays of the event churned a typical short-run happenstance into an iconic event. The odds of winning even a small field tournament are extremely small; over a relatively tiny number of hands, a great deal of luck is involved. However, literature and forum discussion emphasizing both these realities and an understanding of the mathematical, psychological, and logical complexities that made those Las Vegas legends so successful paled in comparison to the massive sample size of ESPN replays of short-run Main Event highlights.
By 2005, ESPN had succeeded in introducing a once cultish game to the mainstream. In doing so, the network provided a delirious combination of escapism and the promise of making exorbitant amounts of cash the proverbial American Way. The coverage drew in a number of online poker sites that ceaselessly promoted their “free play” software during commercial breaks.
That year, the online poker industry had amassed $60-billion in poker wagers with 2.4 billion dollars in reported revenue (up from 82 million dollars in 2001). Consistent with the Moneymaker ethos, bold aggressive moves rife with logical errors paid off handsomely at the online tables. Even insufferably tight players with only a basic understanding of hand values could wait for quality holdings and then let a litany of weak players pay them off with lesser hands or terrible bluffs.
