The Moneymaker Effect: The Inside Story of the Tournament That Forever Changed Poker

One minute, poker was an old-man’s game played in smoky backrooms and televised now and again in the middle of the night. The next minute, it was a sensation sweeping every casino, dorm room, and man cave, ready for the bright lights of prime time.

What happened? A perfect storm that pushed poker into the mainstream—virtually overnight.

Chris Moneymaker, a 27-year-old amateur poker player with a name nobody could believe was real, defied the odds at every turn to win the World Series of Poker main event, at the precise moment the twin inventions of online poker and the hole-card camera combined to revolutionize the game. One of history’s greatest underdog stories lit the fuse. Millions of people around the world couldn’t look away. Poker exploded.

More than a decade later, the Moneymaker story continues to reverberate, and the poker community still can’t stop talking about it. Those who were there and had their lives changed by the 2003 World Series tell the story best and in The Moneymaker Effect, more than 30 of them—poker pros, television executives, producers, journalists, publicists, an inventor, a screenwriter, a sports handicapper, and of course, the champion himself—bring back the memories of the Moneymaker miracle.

Publisher Reviews:
Chris Moneymaker's improbable tale -- amidst the backdrop of old-school gamblers, Binion's casino and the WSOP -- comes to life in this fabulous oral history of the journey that changed poker forever.
--Norman Chad, ESPN poker analyst

Do you love it when the underdog wins big? If so, then Eric Raskin’s The Moneymaker Effect, which recounts in eyewitness detail amateur Chris Moneymaker's epic victory over the big-time pros in the 2003 World Series of Poker, will blow you away. In so doing, Moneymaker also set off the sonic boom that is today’s multi-billion-dollar global poker industry.
-- Terry Hummel, former Rolling Stone publisher