Henry Orenstein

Henry Orenstein was born in Poland in 1923 and survived five different Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust before immigrating to the United States after the war. He built a fortune as a toy inventor and entrepreneur, founding the company that became Topper Toys and later serving as the driving force behind the Transformers toy line at Hasbro, holding more than a hundred patents over his lifetime. Beyond toys, Orenstein transformed televised poker by inventing the hole card camera, a device that let television audiences see players face down cards without disrupting play, an innovation credited with fueling the poker boom of the 2000s. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2008 and died in 2021, remembered as one of the most influential figures in poker history despite never being primarily known as a player himself.