Transcription
A standard deck of playing cards can be arranged in a number of ways. In fact, that exact number happens to be 52 factorial, which can otherwise be expressed like this, or in standard notation like this. It's a number so astronomically huge that it would take me a minute to even pronounce the whole thing. The scale of it is mind-boggling, far beyond anything we can hope to visualize with our human frame of reference. It doesn't really make sense how this unfathomable quantity manages to fit neatly inside such a simple man-made object. Depending on how you look at it, a deck of cards might as well contain all the possibilities in the universe.
The whims of chance are as tantalizing as they are confounding, something that exists just beyond the realm of our control. If you managed to achieve total mastery over the odds, you could basically do anything you wanted. Anyone who somehow harnessed this elusive power would suddenly gain access to unlimited possibilities. You could dodge bullets, hit every green light, and never lose at Monopoly again.
But if we're being honest, you and I both know exactly how everyone would use this ability. They'd immediately go out and buy a winning lottery ticket, hit a 25-way parlay, and dump everything else into tomorrow's best-performing stock. Because if there's one thing people love to imagine themselves doing, it's getting rich when given one shot at a lucky streak. The best we could hope to do with it would be to make some serious money.
Allow me to introduce you to the star of our story. His name is Chris Money Maker. Yes, that is his real name. It is believed to have descended from the German name Nürer, belonging to distant relatives who manufactured silver and gold coins. Chris would end up working with money in his own right, earning a modest living as an accountant for a local restaurant chain. His life was average in just about every way until one fateful evening when everything took an unexpected turn.
The story of Chris Money Maker began with what most of you are probably doing right now: staring at a screen while trying to kill some time. The year was 2003, and online poker had taken America by storm. While the game of poker, in one form or another, had existed for centuries, its popularity didn't really take off until the advent of one specific variant. The name of the game is No Limit Hold'em, where players have to make the most out of five community cards and just two hole cards, which are unknown to the rest of the table. Like all the best games, Hold'em is easy to understand and difficult to master. But what makes it rather unique is its delicate balance between luck and skill.
A game like chess, for example, is entirely skill-based. The outcome is determined entirely by the strategic mastery of the player. There is really no other way to win besides outplaying your opponent heads-up. This leads to fair but predictable results in competitive play, where the winner almost always comes down to the better player. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have a game like slots, whose outcome is entirely dependent on luck. The player is fully at the mercy of chance, with no way to gain any sort of strategic edge. There is no real difference between new and experienced players, since everyone has equal odds at hitting the jackpot in slots. Anyone can win, but no one has any control over whether they do.
And then, somewhere in the middle, you have poker. A shuffled deck of cards may seem as random as a slot machine, but with enough practice and game sense, skilled players do manage to gain an edge over the competition. That edge is achieved through America's favorite pastime: lying. You see, poker is ultimately a game of information. The advantage exists in gathering information about your opponent's cards while concealing your own. Information can be communicated through betting. Typically, a big bet is supposed to represent a strong hand, but that's not always the case. Since you can never be certain about your opponent's cards, there is always an opportunity for deception. The technique of bluffing allows poker players to overcome losing hands by pretending to have something stronger. Understanding precisely when to bluff adds a layer of skill and complexity to an otherwise random game. In poker, the best player doesn't always win, but if you play your cards right, you can still stand a fighting chance, even when the odds aren't in your favor.
Throughout his life, Chris Money Maker never saw himself as anything more than an amateur player. His only action came from various low-stakes online rooms. Compared to the competition, he was above average, often winning more than he lost. But one day, in April 2003, he finds himself on the run of his life. It all started with an $86 buy-in to an online tournament on the site PokerStars.com. After several hours, he is one of the final four players remaining. By now, Chris had participated in dozens of these events, but he had never come this close to winning. Unfortunately, this just so happens to be a tournament he's not trying to win. His initial plan is to flame out in fourth place and collect the $8,000 cash prize to pay off some credit card debt. That's because the grand prize of this tournament is a little unorthodox. Rather than a cash payout, the top three finishers will be given a free ticket to the World Series of Poker Main Event, otherwise known as the most prestigious tournament in all of poker. Chris reasonably concludes that his chances of finishing in the money at such an event would be slim to none and prepares for the far more sensible option of taking the money right in front of him.
However, in the heat of the moment, he stops to reconsider his options. While he really wants to cash out, his friends and family are far more excited about the alternative. After mulling it over for a bit, they eventually convince him to answer the call to adventure under one condition. Unwilling to leave so much money on the table, Chris wants some insurance. His World Series ticket is equivalent to a $10,000 price of admission, and he intends to sell off some of that equity. His father offers him $2,000 in cash for a 20% present stake, but Chris is not exactly sold yet. Before going through with it, he needs a little more investment from a friend who was willing to take a gamble. His name is Dave Gamble. I swear, I'm not making any of this up. It all sounds absurd, I know, but it's not as unusual as you may think. Another interesting quirk of probability is that eventually, strange coincidences are bound to happen. On very rare occasions, order emerges from chaos, and one spring day in 2003, a man named Money Maker and a man named Gamble walked into a casino. Do you think they were feeling lucky?
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A poker tournament will inevitably guide the player to one of two outcomes: you either end up with no chips or all of the chips. The 2003 Main Event featured a record-setting field of 839 competitors, each beginning with a chip stack of 10,000. In the next 5 days, there will be just one player left standing, holding on to the entire supply of 8.39 million. The reward for this monumental task is a payday of $2.5 million. So, if you want to become the champion, you've got to start taking people's chips. A job that's easier said than done. In poker, you lose chips just by sitting at the table. The system of blinds and antes puts each player on a timer. If you just sit around waiting, your stack will gradually bleed out into nothing. The only way to increase your chip count is to start winning hands, which cannot be done without putting your own chips at risk. Eventually, the design of the game forces you into making aggressive decisions in order to make progress. The only problem is that it's hard to be aggressive when you're going face-to-face with the best in the world. Unlike other prestigious competitions, the WSOP Main Event is peculiar in being open to the public. It doesn't matter if you just learned how to play on the cab ride over; as long as you pay the price of admission, you have a seat at the table with the masters of the game. It's the equivalent of driving your car onto the grid of the Indy 500. But make no mistake about it, poker's elite are more than happy to welcome a bunch of amateurs to the party. To them, it's like letting in more minnows to the shark tank.
As Chris Money Maker arrived at his table on Day 1 of competition, he's certainly feeling like fresh meat. His goal at this point is to simply survive until Day 2. Just an hour into the game, he's already encountered his first roadblock: a player by the name of Jim Worth, better known by his screen name, Crazy Kanuck. Chris immediately recognizes him as a powerful foe from his online games. It's not long before the Crazy Kanuck sees Chris as an easy target. He starts playing Chris more aggressively and taking his chips. Eventually, Chris realizes that he won't survive for long as the weak link, so he starts fighting back. After flexing some muscle with a few big bets, he gets his rival to back off, taking some pots in the process. By the end of the afternoon, he's actually up a few thousand chips and feeling pretty good about himself. Players are busting out of the tournament already, and he's sitting on a decent cushion. After studying the other players at the table, he likes his chances. He's got everyone else mostly figured out, except for one fellow: an older gentleman in a green polo. Chris doesn't recognize him until he looks over at the side of the venue and sees his picture on the wall. All this time, Chris had been playing alongside the 1995 Champion, Dan Harrington, and he didn't even know it. The realization was a dark reminder that he was still very much out of his depth and that in this tournament, threats are lurking around every corner.
But after this moment, something interesting happens. Chris gets moved to a different table and starts running hot. He picks up several strong hands, makes a few good calls, and all of a sudden, finds himself behind a stack of 60,000 chips. In fact, he wraps up Day 1 in 11th place overall. He's in such good shape that he can actually sleep well that night. Unfortunately, he ends up sleeping a little too well. The next morning, Chris wakes up to a horrifying sight: he has overslept the beginning of Day 2. While frantically rushing to the casino floor, he assumes that he's just been disqualified, throwing away the single biggest opportunity of his life. When he gets down to the tables, people wonder what he's so worked up about. He then notices his stack of chips waiting for him at an open seat. Turns out, all that panic was just another rookie mistake.
Chris eventually settles back into the game and seems to pick back up where he left off. He's able to capitalize off his chip advantage and bully some weaker players off their hands, even knocking some opponents out of the tournament. After several hours, he's built his stack up to 180,000. However, this surge of momentum changes course when two new players arrive at the table. One of them is Phil Ivey, who is regarded today as possibly the greatest poker player in history. The other is Johnny Chan, who at this time is poker's biggest celebrity. The two-time Main Event champion was iconic enough to show up in Hollywood movies and was one of the only players that Chris immediately recognized. Just as soon as they appear, they start cleaning him out. No matter what he tries, Chris is simply no match for the pros. They're just too intimidating and too aggressive for him to get any sort of edge. By the end of the day, Ivey and Chan have drained his stack down to just over 100,000. The setback knocks him down to 26th place in the standings. Although he's losing ground on the leaders, Chris is still holding his own. By the end of Day 2, there are just over 100 players left in the tournament. If he can hang on for one more day, then he's actually on pace to finish in the money. But surviving at this stage in the tournament is easier said than done. By now, the cream has risen to the top, and the pool of unskilled opponents has dried up. No matter where he lands tomorrow, he's going to be swimming with the sharks.
Day 3 of the tournament begins with another complication for Chris. He manages to wake up on time, but now he's having trouble finding his table. After searching for a while, he has to stop and ask one of the organizers, who points all the way down to the end of the venue, past a crowd of spectators, and into the center of a bunch of lights and cameras. Chris had been assigned to the TV table. "One man I have to mention before we get underway at our featured table: his name is Chris Money Maker." As if the situation couldn't get any more nerve-wracking, his seat is sandwiched between a murderer's row of poker pros. Joining him at the table are Paul Darden, Howard Lederer, and a familiar foe in Johnny Chan. When the action begins, Chris is too afraid to play a hand. He's almost mesmerized watching the clash of poker titans in front of him. He remarks at how effortlessly they toss their chips into the pot, as if the huge amounts of money they're throwing around are of no concern to them. These are the true high rollers of the game, playing next to an average Joe who's never taken home more than 40 grand in a year. Chris figures that he might as well use this opportunity to study the masters. He tries to get in their head and understand how they think. After several hands of staring down the pros, he notices a couple of them are staring back. He imagines it's some kind of mind game, a spontaneous test of will to see if he's truly worthy of being in their presence. This sublime moment is eventually broken when Johnny Chan speaks up to remind Chris that it's his turn. When he realizes what happened, he just about turns red. Chris got so caught up in his own head that he forgot to fold his cards. His most humiliating blunder of the tournament, and it was all caught on camera. He had just exposed himself as the biggest fish at the table. His only saving grace is that the broadcast is on tape delay and that the debacle may not end up bearing. Johnny Chan tries to reassure him that a gaffe like that will never see the light of day, unless, of course, he wins.
At this moment, something changed within Chris Money Maker. While many others would have crumbled under the embarrassment, Chris ended up responding to the situation in an unexpected way. He feels oddly relaxed, like he has nothing left to fear. He starts to realize that his lack of experience offers him a unique advantage. He may be a no-name player, but that also makes him an X-factor. After spending the whole tournament in their shadow, he begins to turn the tables on the pros. A few hands later, Chris goes head-to-head with Howard Lederer. He gets dealt a pair of Aces, the strongest opening hand in the game, and recognizes that now is the time to strike. After a few rounds of betting, Money Maker shoves all in. Lederer has him covered in chips, meaning that if Chris loses, he's out of the tournament. Lederer thinks for a while and ultimately decides to fold, allowing Chris to collect a nice pot. It started to look like the momentum was back on Chris's side, a trend that became apparent after his showdown with Johnny Chan. Ever since the staredown, Chan had been struggling, and his situation was starting to get desperate. Just before the dinner break, Money Maker gets dealt an 8 of hearts and decides he wants to tangle with the master. By now, the other players have exited the table, leaving only the challenger and the champion. The flop comes with two hearts and an Ace, putting Money Maker in great shape. After Chan raises him, he decides to shove all in. Chan makes the call, putting his tournament life at risk. He turns over the King-five of hearts. Money Maker jumps out of his seat. He has Chan dominated with 87% odds to win the hand. Just one other card is all it takes to seal the deal. Chris Money Maker had just busted the most famous player in the tournament. "I sat with the best in the world, and I won." All of a sudden, this unsuspecting accountant from Tennessee had stumbled into the script of a Hollywood movie. Through all the commotion, he secured a spot in the top 45, good enough for a payout of at least $25,000. However, for the first time in the tournament, Chris starts to set his sights on something greater. By the end of Day 3, he's sitting on 357,000 chips, good enough for sixth place overall. If he can maintain his position for one more day of action, he's on pace to make the final table, where the prize money gets truly life-changing.
By Day 4, the Main Event, the demeanor of the room is noticeably different. The pleasantries of small talk and friendly banter have been replaced with an air of tension and unease. At this point, the players can no longer ignore what's at stake. From here on out, there are no more friends, no more patience, and no more room for error. In the next 48 hours, a champion will be crowned, and everyone has their eyes on the prize. After knocking out Johnny Chan, Chris Money Maker is now on everybody's radar, and the pros are eager to prove that his hot streak is nothing more than a lucky break. His first challenge comes from Alberto Brenes, otherwise known as The Shark. After a couple of big bets, Brenes lures Chris into shoving all in with just a pair of eights. When Chris sees him turn over Aces, he knows he's in trouble. Brenes has him almost dead to rights with a 92% chance of taking the pot. However, Money Maker's luck hasn't run out yet. Here comes the turn, and it's an eight of clubs. The last card is no help to Brenes, and he has been eliminated. Remarkably, Money Maker gets bailed out by an unlikely set of eights that sends the shark packing. This moment is a huge wakeup call for Chris, who understands that he just dodged a bullet. The spectacle certainly hasn't helped him shake the perception of a lucky amateur, but as the day goes on, he actually begins to prove his worth. Howard Lederer is the next pro to go after Chris. Confronting him with another all-in bet, this time Chris makes the right call and lays down on his cards. After that, he gets involved with the 1998 Champion, Scotty Nguyen. Chris immediately makes another correct read and bluffs him off his hand. After stealing a pot from one of the best in the world, Money Maker decides to take things a bit further. Facing off against French millionaire Chu Hang, he pulls off another bluff, and this time shows his cards to the table. His rivals are shocked to see that Chris had been holding absolute junk. For the first time, the other players are finally starting to see him as a credible threat. Halfway through the action, Chris is down to the final 22 and remains in sixth place on the leaderboard. The final table is looking more and more likely, but he still has plenty of foes standing in his way.
Chris's next showdown would come against Dutch Boyd, another young gun who'd spent most of the afternoon with the chip lead. As the story goes, he had grown up as some kind of boy genius, earning his Masters in Law at just the age of 18. As fate would have it, he would end up using his profound intellect to play cards for a living. He spent the whole tournament outsmarting the competition until he ends up face-to-face with Chris Money Maker. Chris jumps into the action with a pair of threes. The flop is a bunch of low cards, which improve his odds a bit, so he bets. Dutch stares him down for a while and then raises all in. Chris is now slated with his toughest decision of the tournament. If he makes the call and he's wrong, it's game over. A pair of threes is far from the best hand; there are many other combinations of cards that outright beat it. Here, Chris thinks for a long time. He considers all the different angles and possibilities, but at the end of it all, he just doesn't buy the story. Money Maker calls, and Dutch is beside himself. He's been caught out on a stone-cold bluff. The next two cards are no help for him, and Chris doubles up to 1.2 million chips. Dutch asks him if he exploited some kind of hidden tell. He doesn't believe that a player like him could have possibly made such a read. Chris simply responds that he had a gut feeling. Often times in poker, instincts matter more than intellect. Moments later, Dutch Boyd is knocked out of the tournament in 12th place, and before long, Chris has survived into the top 10, one spot away from the final table. This is where the competition reaches a bottleneck. For the pros, making the final table is a point of pride, and no one wants to be the odd man out. The game slows to a crawl as every player tightens up. The stalemate extends well past midnight. Chris has now been playing poker for over 13 hours straight. Under the mounting exhaustion, he's trying his best to weather the storm until he sees an opportunity. Starting with Ace-Queen, Chris hits a set on the flop. After an unsuspecting nine on the turn, he likes his chances and bets big. He would have felt even better if he wasn't challenging Phil Ivey, the most dangerous player left in the field. Immediately, he proves why that's the case and raises all in. Chris makes the call, and to his horror, Ivey turns over a pair of nines. With a pair of queens already on the board, it's good for a full house, blowing Chris's hand away. His odds of winning have plummeted to just 17%. Ivey did everything right and provided another reminder of why many consider him to be the best to ever play. In the future, he'll go on to win dozens of tournaments, but as fate would have it, this was not one of them. An incredible knockout blow for probably the best player left in the tournament. The river card is an Ace, giving Money Maker a superior full house. Ivey is out of the tournament in 10th place, and Chris has advanced to the final table as the overall chip leader. An amateur player who just a month ago was stressing out over $8,000 is now in prime position to take home $2.5 million. Thus far, it's been a great story, inspirational even, but if we're being realistic, this has to be the part where we step out of Neverland. He's made some great plays, toppled some of the best in the game, and even seems to have luck on his side, but at some point, Chris's inexperience is going to come back to bite him, and he's going to get beat. His best course of action now should be to coast off his lead, enjoy the ride, and wait for the inevitable. However, the man named Money Maker has other plans.
The law of large numbers states that after enough trials, everything eventually regresses to the mean. Four days ago, Chris had never set foot in a real-life poker tournament, and now finds himself leading the most important event of the year. He's about as big of a statistical outlier as they come. In all this time, everyone has been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the online fish, but as long as the pros have believed this, Chris has continued to pick them off one by one. He starts the final day of competition by knocking out David Gray. A while later, he takes out Tomer Ben-Vesty, followed by Jason Le, bringing Money Maker into the top three. The next one to fall is Dan Harrington, the original specter who haunted him all the way back at his very first table. And with that, Chris Money Maker had only one player left to beat. His final opponent is Sam Farha, who resembles the dictionary definition of a poker professional: cunning, unflappable, and visibly richer than you. Chris has come face-to-face with his complete antithesis: a seasoned veteran who is finally going to put the scrappy underdog in his place. There's a break in the action before the final showdown, as the tournament organizers remind everyone what they're fighting for. They wheel out $2.5 million in cold, hard cash and dump it on the table. Few people in history have ever been in the presence of that much physical money. It's enough dough that Chris can literally smell it. The moment snaps him back to reality. He'd been so dialed into the game that he forgot what was at stake, and for the first time in a while, Chris thinks about playing it safe. During the break, he runs into Sam Farha in the restroom and tries to cut a deal. He wants to split the first and second place purse 50/50 and just play for the trophy. Since Chris has about a 2-to-1 chip advantage, he considers it a generous offer. Farha, however, disagrees. He doesn't see Chris as an equal opponent and wants a greater share of the winnings. For as far as he's come, the others still don't think he deserves to be there. To truly earn their respect, Chris has to go out and prove himself once and for all.
The championship battle rages back and forth. After 90 minutes of action, neither player has been able to get an edge. That all changes on the 27th hand of the showdown. As the cards are dealt, both players fire into the pot. Chris has King-Seven, and after the turn card, has both a straight and a flush draw. Sensing an opportunity, he bets big. The river card comes, and it's a total brick. Chris misses on both of his draws and is hung out to dry with just King-high. He thinks for a bit and then does the unthinkable: Money Maker shoves all in with absolute junk. Farha has him beat with a pair of nines. He has a golden opportunity to double up and put Chris in a nearly insurmountable deficit. All he has to do is make the call. Farha stares Chris down, scanning for any sort of inconsistency. Money Maker has gone still as a statue for the next minute. He doesn't move a muscle. After an excruciating wait, Farha lays down. Chris has just pulled off the bluff of the century. On the very next hand, he flops two pair and catches Sammy on a pair of jacks. Farha moves all in, and Money Maker calls. After two more cards, it's all over. With a full house, Chris Money Maker eliminates Sam Farha, and in a very swift and unlikely manner, is atop the poker world. When he finally looked over his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. The 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event belongs to Chris Money Maker. He finishes out his run with a tournament-winning full house in his first-ever live event. He walks out of the casino a multi-millionaire. In the words of ESPN commentator Norman Chad, "This is beyond fairy tale; it's inconceivable." Amidst the celebration, poker vets Mike Matusow and Eric Seidel are discussing what just transpired. Matusow is distraught, believing that the air of legitimacy around poker pros had just been dismantled. If a guy like Money Maker could come in and beat the best in the world, what would that say about the industry as a whole? Seidel, on the other hand, sees things more pragmatically. He suggests that they donate Chris 5% of their future earnings because the world of poker was about to change forever.
Several months later, the tournament would air on ESPN, marking the beginning of what came to be known as the Money Maker Effect. The program drew in record viewership for televised poker, prompting the network to re-air the special nearly a dozen times. It turned out that the American public found Chris's story to be quite inspirational. People became enamored by the idea of raking in millions by playing cards for a few days. Just one year later, the WSOP Main Event saw triple the entrants. The poker boom was underway, as everyone tried to become the next Chris Money Maker. In the following decades, this influx of new players would end up earning the poker industry billions. However, the great irony with all of this is that for the part he played in it, Chris didn't actually walk away with that much money. Remember that stake he sold to his friends and family? Well, he had to make good on that promise. For his $2,000 share, Mike Money Maker went on to pocket half a million. And as for Dave's gamble, he turned his $2,500 wager into $625,000. That would have still left Chris with a nice chunk of change, but as it turned out, Mrs. Money Maker got more than she bargained for when her husband started traveling the world to play poker for a living. The two would end up splitting, and most of the remaining prize money would leave with her. Chris may not have been left with much of a fortune, but he did have fame. The folks at PokerStars greatly appreciated the free promotion he'd given them and agreed to cover the cost of any event he wanted to enter. Needless to say, this new career path was certainly a step up from accounting. At the end of it all, Chris had found his true calling in life, and as time went on, it became apparent that his magical run may not have been such a fluke after all. Soon enough, he would prove himself as quite a natural at the game, and as of 2024, he's still winning tournaments.
It's now been over 20 years since Chris Money Maker changed poker forever. If you catch him at the right time, you can still see him trying his luck at the place where it all began. This year's Main Event featured more than 10,000 entrants competing for a grand prize of $10 million. Today, the game is certainly different than the one Moneymaker came into. Many would agree that modern poker lacks much of the mystique and wonder that once made it so entertaining. The colorful cast of characters from the past have slowly been phased out by a new generation of players who prefer a more robotic and analytical approach to the game. With the rise of computers and poker engines, everyone now understands the statistically optimal way to play. After all this time, we're still trying to master the odds, but no matter how advanced your strategy is, no one really controls their destiny. Whenever you shuffle a deck of cards, there's an astronomically high chance that the combination you hold in your hands has never existed before in history. The universe is full of possibilities, a few of which will lead us towards strange and beautiful surprises, to things far more valuable than money. When you think about all the cards that had to fall exactly right for the story to turn out this way, it's hard to believe it really happened. Of course, there are those who will tell you that there's no such thing as chance. Events either happen or they don't. As far as we're concerned, the probability is either zero or 100%. The other numbers are just there to make our unknowable future feel a bit less murky. Life is a lot more unpredictable than we'd often like to admit, and sometimes it's incredible what can happen when you no longer fear the odds.