To be totally honest, Christopher Bryan Moneymaker doesn't look much like a poker player.
At first glance he seems to be just one of those good-natured Southern boys who wears a baseball cap, eats grits, cheers on his favorite football team, and spends his Friday nights drinking beer, catching catfish or shooting pool.
That's just on the surface.
Moneymaker is, in reality, a professional poker player who, in 2003, claimed poker's biggest prize, the World Series of Poker. He did it after winning his $10,000 buy-in on-line in a Poker Stars satellite tournament.
It cost him $86 to enter the tournament. When the final hand was dealt, Chris took home a first place prize of $2.5 million. To win that money, he had to play heads-up against Sam Farha, one of the shrewdest professional players on the poker circuit.
A true Southern boy at heart, Moneymaker was born in Atlanta, GA. He attended high school in Knoxville, TN. and won his master's degree in accounting from the University of Tennessee.
After graduation, Chris found work as a comptroller and worked part-time in a restaurant to pay the bills. He was married, and his wife wasn't thrilled about his passion for poker, which she felt was a waste of time.
At night he would play poker on the Internet. Moneymaker has a mathematical mind and was a winning Internet player from the moment he sat down at a computer.
After winning the $10,000 buy-in to the World Series of Poker, he traveled to Las Vegas and literally destroyed the competition. Playing heads-up against Fahra, he went all-in on king-high, and Farha folded his pocket nines. On the final hand, his 5-4 beat Fahra's j-10 on a board of j-5-4-8-5.
Moneymaker traveled back to Tennessee, triumphant, with more money than he had ever seen before in his life. He told his wife he wanted to quit his job and play poker tournaments on a full-time basis. She refused to go along with it.
As he later told an interviewer, 'The main reason for the divorce was me wanting to be a traveling poker pro. She didn't sign up for that life. She was married to a stay at home accountant who didn't travel the world, was away all the time, and gambling a lot of money.
'It was a choice I had to make. I tried to be good, stay at my job, and be that accountant. But in all honesty, I didn't want to.'
He married his current wife, Christina, in Las Vegas in April 2005. They live in Nashville, TN.
Moneymaker's unprecedented win triggered an avalanche of Internet players who discovered poker overnight. They figured if somebody like Chris could do it, so could they and millions of people became Internet players.
Chris appeared on the 'Tonight' show in New York with Jay Leno. He wrote his autobiography, 'Moneymaker: How An Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million At The World Series of Poker.' He quit his job to become a spokesman for Harrah's Entertainment, owner of the WSOP, and Poker Stars. He also started his own company, 'Moneymaker Gaming,' and went on the road as a tournament poker player.
Moneymaker quickly proved he was not a flash in the pan.
He won $200,000 when he finished second in the 2004 Shooting Stars Tournament. He picked up another $139,000 when he won the World Championship of On-Line Poker with a $10,000 buy-in. He finished 11th in the 2011 Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure, pocketing $130,000 for his efforts. And in 2011, he placed second behind Eric Seidel in the National Heads-up Poker Tournament and collected $300,000.
When he isn't playing poker, Chris relaxes by playing golf, football, and basketball. Just a good ol' Southern boy who has that Moneymaker touch.
Author: Geno Lawrenzi Jr.
(Geno Lawrenzi Jr. is an international journalist, magazine author and ghostwriter and poker player who lives in Phoenx, AZ. He has published 2,000 articles in 50 magazines and 125 newspapers. If you want to share a gambling story or book idea with him, send an email to glawrenzi@gmail.com ).
