Chris Moneymaker: WSOP Gold Bracelet Winner

Moneymaker is probably best known for winning the 2003 World Series of Poker
main event. After qualifying for the WSOP in a satellite tournament, this
inexperienced player was one of the most unlikely candidates to win. His victory
proved to the world that with a little luck and a lot of hard work, anyone truly
can win the WSOP.

To learn more about Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP experience and to see how his
life has changed as a result of winning, please read this thorough biography.

Early Life

Chris Moneymaker made his grand entrance into the world on November 21st,
1975. While he was born in Atlanta, Georgia, he would actually spend the
majority of his childhood growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee. Moneymaker was the
middle child, having an older brother and a younger sister.

His father worked for a travel agency, which provided the family with many
free vacations over the years. One of Moneymaker’s favorite childhood memories
occurred on one of those free vacations. It was the family’s first time on a
cruise ship. He remembers scheming with his brother and sister about how they
could sneak into the ship’s casino without their parents or security noticing.
They once made it to a slot machine and managed to pull the lever before being
escorted out of there. Unfortunately, they didn’t win any money in the process.

His mother’s job didn’t provide free vacations, but it did provide free booze
on occasion. His mother’s family owned a liquor store, so Moneymaker would spend
many of his afternoons helping out there. His main responsibilities were to
clean the store and help customers find what they were looking for. After a long
day of work, his grandfather would allow him to crack open a beer, so they could
enjoy it together.

When he wasn’t at the family liquor store, you would probably find him
hanging out with his brother and their friends in the basement of their house.
They would shoot pool, play foosball, and even do a little gambling down there.
Their game of choice was a dice game Moneymaker invented, which was basically
just a watered-down version of craps. It involved 3 dice and 1 roller. The
roller had to pick a number between 1 and 6 to bet on. How much the roller got
paid was determined by how many times that number came up. If it didn’t come up
at all, the roller would be forced to forfeit his stake.

When he was younger, the stake would be as little as a few pennies to as high
as a couple quarters. As he grew older, the stake reached nearly 5 dollars per
roll. There was never a great deal of money involved, but this experience gave
him an appetite for gambling early on. His love of card games also developed
early on, as he would often play bridge with his grandma and blackjack with his
father.

An Average Life

After graduating towards the top of his class from Farragut High School,
Moneymaker received a scholarship to attend the University of Tennessee. After
dedicating 6 years of his life to his studies, he graduated with both his
bachelor’s and his master’s degrees in accounting.

Shortly after college, he started working as an accountant for a small chain
of Nashville restaurants. It was also around this time that he married his
long-term girlfriend, Kelly. The newlywed couple moved to the suburbs to start
their life together, and within a couple years, they had a beautiful baby
daughter named Ashley.

As a devoted husband and a new father, Moneymaker never even considered
pursuing poker as a career. He enjoyed playing poker once a week with his
friends and occasionally online at PokerStars, but that was all the action he
needed. For the most part, he was content with his average life. The only thing
that was frustrating him was his overwhelming pile of credit card debt.

2003 World Series of Poker

While we don’t recommend trying to solve your debt issues by playing poker
online, it did work out for Moneymaker. He entered a $39 buy-in satellite
tournament at PokerStars. The top 3 winners would earn a seat at the World
Series of Poker main event, while 4th place would earn $8,000. At first,
Moneymaker started losing on purpose, hoping to land the 4th-place finish for
the cash prize. A friend convinced him to go for 1st, though, explaining that
the World Series of Poker would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. His friend,
of course, was right.

On May 19th, 2003, the World Series of Poker began. Moneymaker was competing
against 838 of the best poker players in the world, having never competed in a
live tournament before. He arrived at Binion’s Horseshoe early that morning to
get in a good breakfast. He ate slowly as he watched the casino start to fill up
with experienced poker players and started to wonder if he had made a mistake in
traveling all the way there.

By the time the tournament was ready to start, though, his nerves were
beginning to subside. Every player, including Moneymaker, started with 10,000
chips. He faced Dan Harrington and several other well-known players that day,
somehow managing to keep his cool and ending with 60,000 chips to his name. That
put him in 11th position, and while it was still too early to tell how the rest
of the tournament would go, these results gave Moneymaker the confidence he
needed to make it through the next four days.

On the second day of the tournament, over half of the competition was
eliminated. There were only 111 players left, including Moneymaker, who sat in
26th position with just over 100,000 chips. This was a great way to end the day,
considering he had such a rough start. Moneymaker had overslept that morning,
which meant his chips were blinded off until he finally arrived.

By the third day of the event, Moneymaker was starting to get attention from
the media. He had made it to an ESPN-featured table and was able to sit next to
one of his biggest poker inspirations: Johnny Chan. At one point during the
game, Chan had to remind Moneymaker that it was his turn to play because he was
taking so long to make a move. Although he was embarrassed, he didn’t let that
stop him from wiping the floor with Chan and the rest of the players at their
table. He ended the day with 357,000 chips, which put him in 6th position.

At the beginning of the fourth day, there were 45 players still in the
running. By the time dinner break rolled around, there were only 22 players
left. Moneymaker’s last game of the day would lead to a heads-up battle against
Phil Ivey. A mixture of skillful moves and good cards allowed him to eliminate
Ivey from the competition. With 2.344 million chips, he would be the chip lead
to start off the final day of the WSOP.

On day 5, the final table dwindled down to just two players: Chris Moneymaker
and Sam Farha. The two faced each other heads-up for 28 hands, which equaled
about a half an hour of play. It was an intense half an hour that ended with a
great bluff by Moneymaker, which caused Farha to fold and the competition to be
over. The crowd went wild as Moneymaker was presented with $2.5 million in cash
and the signature gold bracelet. He had done it; he had beaten the odds and won
the 2003 World Series of Poker main event.

A New Career in Poker

Once Moneymaker won the WSOP, he decided to quit his job and pursue poker as
a full-time career. He signed on with PokerStars, becoming one of their main
spokespersons. Thanks to his success story, thousands of people who had never
showed an interest in online poker before started opening accounts at PokerStars
and other online poker sites. The sudden attention received by the poker
industry became known as the “Moneymaker effect.”

Moneymaker was an inspiration. He started traveling the world, entering in as
many tournaments as he could. He became a regular contender in the World Series
of Poker, the World Poker Tour, the European Poker Tour, and various other
well-known tournaments. Over the course of his career, he has earned a total of
$3.7 million in live tournaments alone. We have provided details on his top 5
most financially rewarding wins below.

Moneymaker’s Top 5 Most Financially Rewarding Wins

Nearly 15 years later, Moneymaker is still going strong. More recently, he
entered in PokerStars’ Megastack No Limit Hold’em tournament in Atlantic City,
New Jersey, where he managed to land a first-place finish and take home the
grand prize of $6,220. He enjoys playing poker on the professional level and
doesn’t have plans to end his career anytime soon.

However, Moneymaker will be the first to admit that a career in poker is not
easy, having said this in an interview with Entertainment Weekly: “But I want
people to understand that poker’s not all glamorous, it’s not all being on TV
and making tons of money. It’s a hard life. It’s a lot of travel. It’s a lot of
weird hours.”

Personal Life

Just one year after Moneymaker’s WSOP victory, he and his wife filed for
divorce. She wasn’t supportive of his decision to pursue poker as a career, and
she didn’t feel like she fit into his new lifestyle. Unwilling to change,
Moneymaker signed the divorce papers and was ready for a fresh start. His
biggest regret was that his relationship with his daughter, Ashley, suffered as
a result of the divorce.

Within a year, Moneymaker married his second wife, Christina Wren. They had a
small, private wedding in one of the casinos off the Las Vegas Strip. They
currently live in Nashville, Tennessee, and have three children together.

Moneymaker is very generous when it comes to donating to charity, but he
prefers to be private about how much he donates because he doesn’t want to brag.
One of his favorite charities is the Humane Society, which works hard to provide
services for animals in need. Another charity Moneymaker donates to regularly is
Autism Speaks. This foundation is very near to his heart because one of his
daughters is actually on the Autism spectrum.

Moneymaker wrote his autobiography titled Moneymaker: How an Amateur Poker
Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker. In this book,
he talks about his childhood, his life before the WSOP, his life after the WSOP,
and where he sees his life heading. Since it was published in 2005, over 40,000
copies have been sold.