SharePokerStars founder Isai Scheinberg has been presented with an Outstanding Achievement Award at the International Gaming Awards in London, last week. The Canadian businessman accepted the award in person in a ceremony held at the switch Savoy Hotel.
PokerStars still holds the prestige of the biggest online poker site in the industry today, although closely challenged by GGPoker. For many years, though, it was clearly dominant, holding around 70% of the market share.
Much of this success has been attributed to the attitude the Scheinberg family took to running their business before selling it to fellow Canadian David Baazov. Back in the day, it was a poker site run by players for players. The Supernova Elite VIP status was legendary, keeping the high stakes players coming back again and again for the lucrative bonus money.
PokerStars also played a major part in the poker boom kicking off back in 2003. Scheinberg was one of the early birds when it came to getting WSOP satellites onto his platform and it was via one of these that Chris Moneymaker qualified for the 2003 WSOP Main Event.
The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s tough to put anybody above Isai Scheinberg as a name for who has done the most to help online poker become what it is today, and his award has been roundly applauded by those who remember his contribution.
When the Black Friday catastrophe happened, many of us were unsure if online poker could even survive. With the American player pool wiped out in just a morning, many of them unable to retrieve their account balances from Full Tilt Poker, it was Isai Scheinberg who stepped in and purchased his long-time rival just for the sake of putting the entire mess right.
That buy-out cost PokerStars $547 million, essentially straight out of Isai Scheinberg’s pocket. How’s that for integrity?
