15 years since the Moneymaker effect, poker’s journey from art to science is at a crossroads

It is 1.30am in a packed Binion’s Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas, and the 2003 poker world championship has boiled down from 389 players to two: Sammy Farha, a seasoned pro wearing a sharp suit and gaping shirt to reveal a chain necklace and chest hair; and the aptly named Chris Moneymaker, a plump accountant from Georgia who qualified online for $86.

Piled high between them is the first-place prize of $2.34m.

“Don’t do it,” jokes Farha as Moneymaker reaches to make a raise at the start of the next hand. It continues innocuously enough until the turn card falls and Moneymaker makes a bold re-raise. Farha calls and suddenly the pot has swollen. The last card lands and Moneymaker misses completely. With the best hand, Farha checks. “I’m all in,” announces Moneymaker, and a noise ripples around the room. Farha thinks it might be a bluff, and says so, but he can’t bring himself to make the monumental call and folds, handing the rookie a huge chip lead.

“I know it’s early in the century,” says commentator Norman Chad, “but that’s the bluff of the century.”

A few moments later Farha is confidently all in, but his grin fades and the cigarette droops in his mouth as Moneymaker turns over the best hand. It’s over, and an anonymous 27-year-old accountant has become a world champion and multi-millionaire all at once.

Poker, and in particular it’s most popular variation Texas holdem, is still enjoying the effects of the boom which emanated from those seismic moments 15 years ago, when millions of hopefuls took to the internet’s virtual poker tables and tried to recreate the Moneymaker effect. Yet the game is now caught in a paradox: it is easier than ever to embrace, with a vast online vault of tools and tips to hone your skills, and yet it is more complex than ever to untangle, to the point where professional play is almost impossible for curious newcomers to enjoy watching.

Thirty years ago poker was a game of bluff and brinkmanship, where master-players felt their way through the darkness by intuition. Today the game has gone through a “scientific revolution” where the best take their cues from an invisible spreadsheet of probabilities and percentages, where players assess risk rather than each other, where what was once an art has become mostly science. The typical poker player has evolved from cigars and cowboy hats to shades and baseball caps, to glasses and a neat side-parting.

open image in gallery

“When I first got into it, just after the Moneymaker effect, hardly anyone really knew how to play well,” British pro Liv Boeree tells The Independent. “It was this black box where the best players were good and we didn’t know why and we just assumed they had really good intuition, but now people study the game theory. The lid has ben lifted and we can see in.

“It’s still really hard to master, but the result is that the best players are scientifically minded – analysts, basically – and the average Joe is now much better than they used to be.”

Few players have successfully ridden the waves of change like the man who leads the all-time tournament money list, Daniel Negreanu. The fast-talking, wise-cracking Canadian was a pioneer for shaping the popular small-ball strategy – essentially playing more hands with smaller bets – but has had to reinvent himself several times over as the new kids on the block figured him out. He took three months off last year, hired a handful of helpers and worked intensely on refining his game.

“I’m playing against really, really top competitors who look for your frequencies and find your holes, so if you have holes they’re gonna exploit them,” says Negreanu.

“I’ve plugged a lot of those holes by having more balance. For example, let’s say in a situation where I have top pair or better I would normally bet 100% of the time, well they would know that if I check, then zero per cent of the time I have top pair or better. Well that’s not good! So now when I have top pair or better, I’m checking 30-40% of the time.

“I found an easy way to do it that isn’t detectable. It’s based on the cards, different colours and suits, so I can look at a flop in a situation where if it comes one way I bet, if it comes another I check. Even if they know you’re randomising, it’s still unexploitable.”

So how does a game going through a scientific revolution, evolving quicker than most players can possibly compute, reach new audiences? How does it engage new fans and persuade them to sit down to watch the best players when even the greats of poker history like Negreanu are desperately trying to keep up?

A simple answer is for the game to embrace its new stats-geek image. Poker has been making an impact on Twitch, the live streaming site predominantly for video game enthusiasts, a captive market full of young information-hungry gamers for whom streaming is already a way of life.

Dutch pro Lex Veldhuis leads the way, having quickly built up a major following on the site as he talks viewers through his thinking while taking on other top players.

“I’m convinced that in a few years, looking back, Twitch will have played a big role,” says Veldhuis. “Earlier this year I went deep in the World Championships Online Poker main event, and near the end I had 34,000 concurrent viewers. At that point I was ranked second on the global platform of Twitch.

“Now thats all nice and fun, right, but think about this: there’s millions of people on Twitch at the moment. They see poker and they think ‘oh, normally I watch League of Legends, normally I watch chess, normally I watch painting, oh cool, this guy’s playing poker’. People on Twitch are only ever two clicks away.

“The cool thing about it being on a gamer platform is from a skill perspective it really attracts gamers. Also it’s a never-ending player pool, there’s people turning 18-21 everyday who come in touch with poker.”

Negreanu agrees that streaming is revolutionising the way poker is consumed.

“What is the key thing about sport?” he asks. ”It’s live. In the past that was never an option for poker: you had the World Series of Poker and six months later you’d air the cut-up footage. Streaming has made it like a sport already.”

open image in gallery

Streaming is not the only innovation the game is trying. One idea is to develop new and more entertaining formats, like PokerStars’ 6+, a fast and furious game which produces more big hands and regular action. Another is a more obvious harp back to the Moneymaker effect: last summer there was a buzz when PokerStars hid 320 golden tickets around the world, each worth admission to one big-money tournament in the Bahamas, full of top pros, the PokerStars Players NL Hold’em Championship (PSPC).

There were myriad ways to get hold of one. Some were awarded at the end of local poker tournaments. Another was given away by Veldhius, who encouraged his followers to do a good deed in order to earn the ticket – an Ecuadorean man donated his time, clothes and even his hair to be made into wigs for cancer patients at his local hospital, and won the entry prize.

Earlier this month those 320 winners were dropped among some of the greatest players in the world with the hope that their stories might resonate beyond the poker bubble. Two got all the way to the PSPC final table and one, 30-year-old Ramon Colillas, won the life-changing top prize of $5.1m (£4m).

Colillas, unlike Moneymaker, had spent the past six years honing his skills on the Spanish circuit, but his highest win before this was €55,000 and his suprise success drew attention back in Spain.

“Little by little it’s sinking in,” says Colillas. “Probably when I get home and see everything happening there then the real moment’s going to come. I’ve got a lot a friends sending me pictures of newspapers, so it’s very weird, but little by little I’m getting there.”

Of course Colillas’s story will not be another Moneymaker – everyone in poker seems to agree that attempting to recreate that moment in Binion’s Horseshoe casino is not a realistic prospect. That was a perfect storm of the internet’s emergence, pocket hole cameras were improving the televised experience, the film Rounders was out, and an ordinary man with that name was showing ordinary people something extraordinary could be done.

Moneymaker showed you don’t have to be a seasoned cardshark or clairvoyant to win at cards; that anyone with a busy brain can learn and hone their skills. Fifteen years on, poker’s challenge is to show that navigating the game’s 133,784,560 hands is still not an impossible task, and to bring the outside world along on its scientific revolution.