Expansion Plans: The Chris Moneymaker Tour is planning to expand, potentially including a European stop by late 2025 or spring 2026, aiming for a larger scale with more international events.
Player Feedback: Participants have responded positively to the tour, appreciating the event structures and price points, indicating the tour’s successful trajectory.
Future Vision: The tour has a five-year growth vision that includes incorporating high roller events and introducing annual awards that could lead players to compete in larger buy-in tournaments.
Life-Changing Opportunities: The tour acts as a platform for life-changing opportunities, exemplified by players like Mike Rossi, who, after winning a main event, went on to participate in and succeed at major international poker tournaments.
Inclusiveness of Poker: Chris Moneymaker emphasizes the inclusive nature of poker, highlighting how dedication and skill in the game can lead to success, independent of a player’s background or physical abilities.
Chris Moneymaker chalked up a special bullet point for his poker career in April – winning a tournament on his own tour. The man who helped spark the poker boom of the 2000s took the top spot in a $300 Moneymaker Tour Omaha event at Maryland’s MGM National Harbor for a payout of $5,195. This wasn’t the biggest cash of his career, but was pretty meaningful.
“I always expect to win,” he says. “Obviously, that’s not how the game works. So I’m pretty happy to get that monkey off my back. It’s funny. I did the PokerStars Moneymaker tour back in the day, where they were giving away $25K seats, and I think I won like three of those events out of the eight or nine that we did. It was a pretty crazy run. But I wasn’t having as much success on my own tour up until two days ago.”
The Moneymaker Tour was launched in May 2023 and debuted his own poker club in Kentucky in 2024. Moneymaker still gets asked to take plenty of selfies with poker fans, and that has been good for business, along with a strong plan to find a niche not currently seen in the market.
Moneymaker and executive manager Tony Burns recently spoke with Casino.org about getting the tour off the ground, the challenges and successes, and where things are headed.
Image Credit: Moneymaker Tour
Moneymaker On Tour
Chris Moneymaker’s surname has become synonymous with poker since he capitalized on an $86 PokerStars satellite entry in 2003 to win the World Series of Poker (WSOP) $10,000 Main Event for $2.5 million. He’s since gone on to more than $8.2 million in live tournament winnings.
Moneymaker branched out with the tour – having a stake in the industry, expanding his brand, and allowing him to play poker as much as he wanted.
Burns was tabbed with running the operation. The former Seminole Hard Rock tournament director has been key in reaching deals with casinos, including recent international expansion in Canada and Aruba. The growth of the tour and other business expansion, however, may mean even more involvement from the company’s namesake in the coming months.
“When I hired Tony, I told him I have one goal and that’s not to work at all,” Moneymaker says. “I’m hiring you and paying you a lot of money. You take care of everything. I show up, I play poker, I go home. That’s the way it’s always been for the last two years.
“I’m going to be transitioning away from that here going forward as we progress forward as a company, when I have to start doing more of the reaching out to companies and figuring out what Tony does a little bit more. He’s taking more of a backseat role. He’s going to transition over to the brands and do some more admin stuff. He wants to be closer to home and be around the family, not be on the road. So we’re in the process of changing everything within the company.”
The “Moneymaker name” certainly helped bring in players and Burns says those poker fans of the 2000s add real energy to events.
“That’s one great thing that I think we’ve been seeing on the tours when we go into these venues,” he says. “We reactivate a lot of nostalgia business, where people that might not have played in the last five, 10, 15 years, come back out once they see the Moneymaker Tour. One great thing about Chris is that I challenge anybody to find somebody that has a bad thing to say about him.
“He’s great with poker fans and takes every photo. He signs every autograph. He’s met so many people and traveled so much in the last 20-plus years. He obviously can’t remember everybody, but the great thing about it is he’ll make them feel like he does.”
The tour’s growth has brought the need for more people to keep the tour moving along and making connections with casinos. Moneymaker is pleased with how players have reacted to the series, which can be found in casinos in locations like Florida, Ohio, Las Vegas, and several others.
“All of our events have been received very well by players, which is always nice to see,” he says. “This one’s (in Maryland) no different. National Harbor is an awesome property. They’ve been bringing us in, and we’ve had an amazing turnout. So all things are good.”
Image Credit: Moneymaker Tour
Solid Guarantees and a Place for Every Player
There are numerous tours running across the country, from lower buy-in series to larger operations like the WSOP and World Poker Tour. The Moneymaker has tried to thread the needle between those heavyweights and some other mid-major tours.
“We run events from $86 to $2,500, so we have something for every price point,” Burns says. “I tell people we’re more mid-stakes, but we can appeal to Chris’s Rolodex of higher-end players as well.”
For example, in 2023 at the Hard Rock Casino in Cincinnati, Moneymaker was joined at the championship final table with 2015 WSOP main event champion Joe McKeehen. Burns’ connections with the Florida scene have helped bring out players in the Sunshine State.
Some financial concerns about where the industry was headed was one of the incentives for launching. Moneymaker didn’t like how some properties were finagling tournament guarantees – adding flights, cutting series short, and picking players out of the poker room and just putting them in tournaments to meet the required prize pool. He also thought the entry fees paid to casinos at some properties on tours were too high.
“Realistically, I started the tour because I saw that the rake was super high in a lot of tours,” he says. “You go and you play certain events, and the amount of money that you pay for events is just ridiculous. Then the structures aren’t very good. I wanted to do a tour that if we put a guarantee on it, we pay a guarantee. We don’t do any shenanigans and we hope the players support it.
“At the same time when we put a guarantee on it, we try to put a reasonable guarantee. We don’t try to do a million dollars just because now it’s cool, and if we don’t hit it, we cancel it and move it down. We put a guarantee that we believe that we can hit and we believe that people support. That’s our business and how we’ve done things. But I saw a definite need for lower vig, paying out guarantees., and better structures.”
So far that effort has worked. The MGM Grand main event in 2024 did feature a $1 million guarantee. The event ran in July as the WSOP played out in Las Vegas and more than doubled the guarantee for a prize pool of $2.2 million.
“The turnouts have been awesome,” Burns says. “The partners have been extremely happy. We’ve returned to all of our partners that we’ve had a stop with outside of one.”
Image Credit: Moneymaker Tour
Growing the Brand
In recent months, Moneymaker has made some key deals with MGM Resorts. MGM Grand in Las Vegas and National Harbor are both now hosting series. The WPT previously hosted series at MGM properties, such as the Bellagio and Aria in Las Vegas and the Borgata in Atlantic City, but that relationship seemed to have ended.
The tour has focused more on events outside the U.S. and that has presented some possibilities with MGM for the Moneymaker Tour.
“Obviously, that did create an opportunity,” Moneymaker says. “WPT really doesn’t do much there and PokerStars NAPT (North American Poker Tour) really hasn’t come back into the U.S. So, honestly, I think there’s an opportunity. But poker’s an ever-changing landscape, so you just never know when a tour is going to kick back up or a new tour is going to start. But for right now, I feel like we have a good niche.
“We service a little bit higher than the RunGood Series. We’re in the WSOP Circuit realm I guess. I think we serve a market that still needs players or still needs tours. But obviously that could change at any given time. It seems like everyday someone’s trying to start up a tour.”
Getting a new tour off the ground hasn’t come without challenges. The operation began with a skeleton crew of employees with Burns wearing several hats. There is quite a bit of competition from other strong tours. Finding sponsors has been a challenge, but that has also been tough for other tours as well. Burns believes the company is moving in the right direction, however, and close to adding a few partners in the sponsorship arena.
Beyond the tour, Moneymaker stays busy. He operates a poker club in Louisville, Kentucky, and hopes to expand to other cities in the coming years. The property is limited in space to hold tour events, but does run satellites. The poker pro and businessman hopes future clubs are large enough to accommodate a tour series.
The Moneymaker name also now extends to a coffee brand and a bourbon is in the works. As an ambassador, Moneymaker represents ACR Poker, after leaving that role with PokerStars after 17 years. Becoming more involved with running the poker product persuaded him to make the move. ACR runs online satellites for Moneymaker Tour events and it seems at least possible BetMGM might consider something like that in the future as well, although he hasn’t been approached about the possibility yet.
“We started our relationship with MGM last summer, and they’ve been a great partner,” he says. “They’ve opened some doors for us, like here at National Harbor. We’ve been talking with some other properties. The more we do with a partner like MGM, the more opportunities we might have down the road for doing things like that (online qualifiers). It’s definitely something that we would look at.
“Again, it’s a pretty new relationship with MGM. It’s been great thus far, and obviously we look to expand that relationship, and we feel like we will.”
Image Credit: Moneymaker Tour
Looking Ahead
Now with several key partners already in place in the U.S., Moneymaker is pleased to see more on the horizon internationally. The Aruba event in October more than doubled the $200,000 guarantee. A Canadian stop was set to begin May 7 at Playground Poker Club in Montreal with a $1,150 main event with a $500,000 guarantee. He’s also looking at adding at least one stop in Europe.
“We’re looking for strategic partners, partners that make sense,” Moneymaker says. “We did Aruba, we did Montreal. We’re going back to Aruba this fall. I know we’ve been in contact with a couple European stops. So I would imagine probably spring 2026 or maybe late fall 2025 will have a European stop as well.”
Considering how things have gone so far, seeing so many players show up to compete and have positive things to say pleases him most of all. That provides some first-hand feedback that the tour is moving in the right direction.
“They’re happy that we provide the structures that we’re providing and the price points,” he says. “It seems like everybody that’s coming out and playing our events are happy with what they’re experiencing.”
The five-year plan calls for the tour to be similar to what it is now, but only larger and with a few more international stops. Some high roller events may be part of the mix and he envisions end-of-the-year awards that could send players to other even larger buy-in events.
One moment stands out for Moneymaker. In May 2023, Mike Rossi came out on top in the $2,500 main event at the Palm Beach Kennel Club in Florida for $134.265. It was the biggest win of his life and brought about an even bigger opportunity with a $26,000 entry into Triton Poker’s Super High Roller Series in London. He then cashed in with a fifth-place finish for $148,200 .
“The whole goal of my tour at the end of the day is to give someone the opportunity to change their life,” Moneymaker says. “Poker, to me, has always been about the joy of the game, but also the ability to change your life. I think it’s a few things on the planet where if you put time and effort into it, it doesn’t matter what your physical abilities are, you can succeed and actually make good money at it.
“There aren’t a whole lot of things out there that give everybody a chance, no matter what you look like or how you are. If you put effort into it, you have a chance to do something. That’s the beautiful thing about poker. It can be a fickle game, but you can also catch a heater of cards and if it’s your time, you change your life.”
