How Chris Moneymaker Teaches Poker

Chris Moneymaker was recently interviewed at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, but not about his own plays this time - he talked about how he teaches poker to other players, especially absolute rookies.

2003 WSOP Main Event champion Moneymaker’s name will be forever remembered in the poker world - his qualification through an $86 PokerStars satellite and his subsequent victory brought about the giant poker boom. His story made the whole world believe they too can turn less than a hundred bucks into millions at the poker table. Just to demonstrate his affect: the 2003 Main Event that Moneymaker won had 839 entries, while the next year’s event had more than twice as many, 2,576.

Moneymaker did not disappear from the poker scene after his historic victory, he went on to be a PokerStars Team Pro player and an ambassador for the Hollywood Poker Open. He was recently spotted at the Caribbean Adventure teaching writer-journalist Maria Konnikova the fundamentals of the game of poker and PokerNews took the opportunity to ask him about his coaching experience.

The Main Event champion hosted “poker boot camps” around the United States where he taught all levels, from absolute beginners to professionals. As we learned from the interview, when he works with rookies he starts off by playing face-up poker and a few pre-arranged “fake hands” with them, discussing every move along the way. After the cards get turned face down, things evidently get much more complicated. 

In the interview, Moneymaker called poker “easy game to learn, hard to master”, then compared it to golf, in the sense that one can find themselves at high-profile social events where the game is played, and thus basic poker knowledge can be useful for networking.

“If I’m teaching someone to play, once you start playing this game you’re probably gonna be playing it for a long time. (...) It is a great game, and there’s so many good facets to it, between social and mathematics that go into it. You don’t have to do it for a living obviously, you can do it for fun” - this is Moneymaker selling poker to newcomers. 

Moneymaker isn’t the only well-known pro who got into coaching, many have tried with varying degrees of success: Doug Polk’s Upswing Poker is a popular poker training service, so is Jonathan Little’s PokerCoaching.com; while Phil Ivey’s Ivey League closed down last year after four years of operation.