There is no shortage of people who want to tell the Isai Scheinberg story. The corporate tale would play in the Washington Post, Forbes, or Esquire. It would play in Vanity Fair or TMZ. If you gave 60 Minutes an exclusive, the Scheinberg story could fill the whole hour.
You might know bits and pieces of the story, but he has never appeared on camera where you can read the man and his words.
In what became a highly profitable case of 'necessity is the mother of invention,' Scheinberg created PokerStars at the turn of the century, because he wanted a website to play the kind of games he was interested in – chess, bridge, and poker – in the same place. And he envisioned a place where someone could play poker tournaments online, something that didn’t exist at the time.
When he sold PokerStars for $5 billion in 2014, the story was a riddled mess of politics, high-dollar business, and the fallout of what happens when those two forces meet.
Click or tap above to watch the full interview now.
Scheinberg belongs in the Poker Hall of Fame
One thing is certain — Isai Scheinberg changed poker forever.
He was the first to give the global poker community a chance to play real money poker tournaments from the privacy of their homes.
PokerStars created the mechanism to kick off the Moneymaker boom and then threw jet fuel on the fire, sending thousands and thousands of entries to the WSOP Main Event. PokerStars spent more money marketing poker as a sport than any of us will ever know. As we have argued before, on that merit alone, Isai Scheinberg belongs in the Poker Hall of Fame.
Ask the Org: Should Isai Scheinberg be inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame?
So, when we got a few minutes of time with Scheinberg, Lee Jones and I wanted to talk about all that as much as we could. (Full disclosure: Lee and I both worked for Scheinberg for many years.)
That’s when Scheinberg surprised us by talking about the things we thought he would never want to talk about – PokerStars’ internal response to the USA’s passage of UIGEA, discussions with the United States Department of Justice, and the DOJ’s abject surprise at how PokerStars reacted to Black Friday.
And so we listened.
The Scheinberg legacy
When asked what he wants his legacy to be, Isai Scheinberg did not talk about how he spearheaded the game’s growth into a monster industry that still thrives today. He didn’t talk about setting a world record for the most players registered in an online poker tournament. He didn’t talk about introducing poker to tens of millions of people around the world.
He essentially said he wanted to be remembered for doing the right thing for players. Isai focused on how PokerStars reacted to the worst day in poker history: Black Friday, the day online poker all but disappeared and struck fear in every poker player with a real money balance on a poker site.
The people who played on PokerStars never had to worry.
If you don’t remember, it was this simple: PokerStars had all of its players’ bankrolls segregated from the company’s operating funds and so all of their players were able to withdraw their funds within weeks after Black Friday, while the other sites’ struggled to repay anyone.
When Full Tilt Poker had not repaid its players more than a year after Black Friday and ultimately had to surrender the company to the DOJ as part of its settlement, Isai did a deal with the DOJ that allowed PokerStars to acquire Full Tilt and then made sure that PokerStars paid the Full Tilt players, too.
If not for the Scheinbergs and PokerStars, the poker community’s liquidity could have vanished. When faced with the power of the United States government, the Scheinbergs could have run with all of our money. They could have let Full Tilt and all of its players’ money disappear.
Imagine it.
Imagine poker today if the roughly $500 million that was on PokerStars and Full Tilt disappeared in 2011. Imagine what the World Series of Poker might look like if all that money just vanished.
Because that is what could have happened, if not for Isai Scheinberg.
If you’re young enough you can be forgiven for not knowing the Scheinberg family is directly responsible for the Moneymaker boom and turning online poker into the single-most important driver of the modern poker world.
Regardless, you must know this: Isai Scheinberg and his family directly saved the poker economy in 2011.
Had Black Friday turned out in any other way, it would have been impossible for Lee and I to end up in the back room of the PokerOrg Legends Lounge sitting across from the man we believe is the most important person in modern poker’s success.
The result wasn’t the full Isai Scheinberg story, but it was the first time he had told any part of it on camera.
