In a week which saw the World Series of Poker smash its all-time Main Event record with more than 10,000 players taking part for the very first time, the man viewed by many as leading the global poker boom during the mid-2000s has received a well-timed honor.
Isai Scheinberg, who founded online poker site PokerStars in 2001, was on Sunday granted a WPT Honors Award – the World Poker Tour’s highest accolade – in recognition of services rendered to the game over the past two decades.
At a lavish dinner and ceremony in Las Vegas attended by a who’s who of the global poker community, Scheinberg and long-time WPT commentator Vince Van Patten became just the eighth and ninth individuals to be granted a WPT Honors Awards since the first was handed out in 2017.
But Scheinberg’s addition is seen as particularly significant given the record numbers witnessed at the WSOP this week.
Born from a determination to create an online poker site better than anything else being offered at that time, PokerStars quickly became the biggest site in the world – at its peak boasting more than 100 million players globally and credited with taking games like No Limit Hold’em to all corners of the planet, Asia included.
Scheinberg was also unique in his insistence that the business must put its players first, profits second. At a time when some leading poker websites found themselves embroiled in various cheating controversies, PokerStars established a reputation as a site to be trusted. Famously, after its main rival of the day, Full Tilt Poker, was shut down in 2011 amid allegations it was a Ponzi scheme whose owners had withdrawn hundreds of millions in player funds, PokerStars acquired the brand and went about repaying Full Tilt’s players all money owed.
Speaking at Sunday’s ceremony, former PokerStars Director of Business Development for Asia Pacific, Jeffrey Haas, said of Scheinberg and his son Mark that he had “never before or since … seen entrepreneurial visionaries willing to put so many of their own resources into realizing their own convictions.
“They invested hundreds of millions of dollars,” Haas said. “The results continue today with tens of millions of new poker players in countries where there were almost none before. [Scheinberg] may not have realized the benefits of these harvests directly, but the poker world today owes him a debt of gratitude.
“Isai’s lifetime contributions to poker are unrivalled in scope or scale. Generations of players will benefit from his contributions, his time, his unwavering moral dedication, and his extraordinary personal and professional investments.
“If you look at [this week’s] WSOP record attendance, I would argue it is due to the cultural zeitgeist precipitated by Isai’s seed planting two decades before.”
As it happens, Scheinberg is also one of 10 finalists nominated for induction into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2023, with the successful candidate to be announced on 13 July.
Whether he proves successful this year or not, his place in poker immortality has long been secured.
