This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In the spring of 2003, Chris Moneymaker was a twenty seven year old accountant in Tennessee who had never played in a live poker tournament in his life. He qualified for that year's World Series of Poker Main Event the only way an amateur with no bankroll for the tournament's ten thousand dollar buy-in realistically could: through a satellite tournament on an online poker site, where a thirty nine dollar entry could, through a chain of smaller wins, turn into a seat at the real thing in Las Vegas.
The World Series of Poker itself was, by then, already the game's most prestigious event, an annual series held in Las Vegas since 1970 that had grown from a single invitational gathering into dozens of tournaments across many variants of the game, with the no-limit Texas hold'em Main Event as its culminating prize. Winning it as a complete unknown, with no live-tournament pedigree at all, was not supposed to be a realistic outcome for a satellite qualifier; it had essentially never happened.
Moneymaker won it anyway, out-lasting a field that included many of the era's most established professional players, and his own name, entirely real and not a poker nickname, became inseparable from the story itself. The scale of what followed is now called the Moneymaker effect: entries to the Main Event, which had numbered a few hundred players in earlier years, grew into the thousands within a few years of his win, driven by amateur players who had watched his run and concluded, correctly in his own case, that a small online buy-in was a real path to the game's biggest stage. Online poker sites, whose satellite tournaments had made his own seat possible, expanded rapidly in the years immediately afterward, a growth story frequently told as beginning with a single accountant's improbable run in 2003.