In 2003 an accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker won a satellite on PokerStars, flew to Las Vegas and won the World Series of Poker Main Event. The name of the site was on his cap in every broadcast. The man who had founded that site was a former IBM programmer in his fifties from the Toronto suburbs, whom almost nobody in poker had ever seen.
That was Isai Scheinberg. For most of the next two decades he remained one of the least visible figures in a game that made its stars into television personalities. He gave his first long media interview only in 2021.
From Vilnius to IBM Canada
Scheinberg was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the mid-1940s, into a Lithuanian Jewish family. He emigrated to Israel and, in the mid-1980s, moved on to Canada, settling in the Toronto area. In 1988 he bought a house in Richmond Hill, Ontario. He worked as a senior programmer for IBM Canada, which meant that when he turned to online poker his instincts were those of a software engineer, not a casino operator.
That background shaped what PokerStars became: a site whose reputation rested on software that worked, built by people who treated stability and fairness as engineering problems.
Building PokerStars
PokerStars began dealing real-money games in 2001, with Isai and his son Mark Scheinberg at its center. The company’s early reputation rested on its software. Tables did not freeze in the middle of a hand. Tournaments ran on schedule. Its shuffle method was explained publicly, at a time when players across the industry suspected online games were rigged.
The Moneymaker win in 2003 was the turning point. A satellite on a modest buy-in had produced a world champion, and PokerStars was the site that sold that dream. Players poured in. The company’s tournament schedule grew into the backbone of online poker, with large guaranteed events every Sunday and an annual World Championship of Online Poker. The business moved its base to the Isle of Man, where it was licensed and regulated.
By 2007 PokerStars was the largest online poker room in the world. It sponsored a team of professionals, including Daniel Negreanu, and launched live tours such as the European Poker Tour, which started in 2004. For a broader view of how the online boom fits into the game’s long history, see the site’s account of poker history.
Black Friday
On April 15, 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against eleven people and several companies tied to the three largest poker sites serving American players: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. The charges included illegal gambling, bank fraud and money laundering, centered on how payments from U.S. players had been processed after the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Isai Scheinberg was one of the defendants.
The day became known as Black Friday. All three sites stopped offering real-money games to Americans. What separated PokerStars from its rivals was what happened next. It returned U.S. player balances, while Full Tilt was found to have been unable to cover what it owed its customers.
In July 2012 PokerStars reached a settlement with the Department of Justice worth $731 million. As part of it, PokerStars acquired Full Tilt’s assets and took on the job of repaying Full Tilt’s players. The deal resolved the civil case against the companies. It did not resolve the criminal charge against Scheinberg personally, and he stayed outside the United States.
The $4.9 billion sale
In 2014 the Scheinberg family sold the PokerStars parent company to Amaya Gaming, a Canadian firm, in a deal valued at $4.9 billion. It was one of the largest transactions the gambling industry had ever seen. Amaya later renamed itself The Stars Group, and in 2020 The Stars Group merged with Flutter Entertainment, owner of Paddy Power and Betfair.
PokerStars itself, once outside the U.S., later returned to regulated American markets state by state. It launched in New Jersey in 2016, in Pennsylvania in 2019 and in Michigan in 2021. The Pennsylvania launch is covered in the context of the state’s later entry into the interstate compact in the report on Pennsylvania joining the U.S. online poker network.
Closing the case in 2020
Scheinberg’s legal limbo ended in stages. He surrendered to Swiss authorities in June 2019 and was extradited to the United States in January 2020. In March 2020, at the age of 73, he pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to one count of operating an illegal gambling business. The bank fraud and money laundering charges were dismissed under the plea agreement.
In September 2020 he was sentenced to time served and a $30,000 fine. There was no prison sentence. He was the last of the Black Friday defendants to resolve his case, and his sentencing closed the criminal file that had been open since April 2011.
The following year he sat down with the journalist Lance Bradley for his first major interview. Scheduled Sunday majors and published security policies, both standard now, started at the company he founded.
For most of its rise almost nobody could have picked him out of a crowd.