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.