The Book on Moorman: The True Story Behind Online Poker’s Biggest Winner

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Updated: August 30, 2016

When a game turned into a University student’s obsession, he turned his passion into a job, and that work into a record-setting career. Ten years on, that career is now a life, and at 31-years-old, 888poker Ambassador Chris Moorman is already a legend, adding to it with every step forward in a game he still loves.

“I still have that passion for the for the game, and as long as I still have that, I’ll still be here,” Moorman told PokerNews from his mother’s home in Brighton, UK, where he’s back playing online poker and enjoying a little downtime, just a day removed from another successful run at the Barcelona, Spain stop on the European Poker Tour.

“I still get that great buzz from the game. It’s obviously a different kind of buzz than it was the first time I won a tournament, but in a lot of ways I’ve learned to appreciate it more. I definitely appreciate that poker allows you to do things on your own time, and on your own schedule. As players, we get to travel to all these amazing places, seeing all these friends all over the world, and I really like that aspect of it. In my life, I have some friends that will stay friends no matter what changes. How close you are at the time is related only to how recently you may have seen each other, and a few months may have passed, but it’s easy to renew those friendships again. You’re quickly the same friends you once were, just in a different place, seeing and experiencing new things together. All this and we get to play a game for a living with the potential of enjoying a bit of luck.

“There are definitely a lot of pluses to poker. Sure, it’s not as easy at it once was, but you can still make a good living, and certainly an enjoyable one. So for now, I’m still stuck on poker.”

Moorman’s track record speaks for itself. He is simply the biggest winner in the history of online poker tournaments, with more than $13.4 million in online cashes and counting. He’s been ranked Worldwide #1 on the PocketFives Online Poker Forums and Rankings an amazing 13 times, and won a record 25 of the sites elusive Triple Crowns. It took him a while to get there, but he’s also had some great success live, earning more than $4.4 million in live tournaments to date, with a win in the 2014 World Poker Tour LA Poker Classic Main Event for $1,015,460 marking the career breakthrough win he’d struggled for years to find.

Moorman celebrating his WPT win. Photo courtesy of the WPT

It may seem hard to fathom, but it all started with an online freeroll.

Moorman played competitive Bridge as a teenager and took Billiards rather seriously while an economics student at the University of Essex. In 2005, returning from a University championship pool tournament, he and his flatmates stumbled upon an ad in a student newspaper for an online freeroll on what was then Victor Chandler Poker.

The lads made a pact: They would learn the game from the ground up together, play the freeroll on Monday nights, and no matter what happened, never make a deposit and get sucked into the world of online gambling.

“We didn’t even know what poker was,” Moorman said. “There wasn’t really much going on Monday nights anyway, so all five of us decided to stay in and play every week. We looked up the rules online, but we were really just clicking buttons. We made a pact not to make a deposit because we really didn’t want to be seen as gamblers. It’s funny now, but at the time we thought we were all looking out for each other.”

The first few weeks, the boys busted from the freeroll with little fanfare. Things changed dramatically for Moorman when he was home for a holiday and logged on to play alone.

“I must have had the most amazing run of cards ever because I still had no idea what I was doing, but I came second for a few hundred dollars,” he said.

Moorman tried to spin it up playing low stakes sit-n-go’s with mostly break even results before he discovered the $.05/$.10 cash games on the site. The misguided strategy of pushing all in every hand worked, until it didn’t, with Moorman picking up $.15 in blinds time after time until someone picked up queens or better and called to bust him.

“I just thought it was rigged,” Moorman said. “The truth is, I just wasn’t very good.”

“I must have had the most amazing run of cards ever because I still had no idea what I was doing.”

Down to his last $25, Moorman let it ride in a single Sit and Go. Online poker’s biggest winner was a simple turn of the cards from never having been, but fate had different plans. Moorman won, and was back to the few hundred he’d started with. He took a week’s break from the game and returned with a new plan.

“I regrouped, came back and realized what I was doing wrong,” he said. Moorman focused on cash games, developing a relatively tight and effective strategy for a time in the history of online poker when he admits it may have been harder to lose than win. He’d hunt bonuses on different online sites, but for the most part, the cash games on Victor Chandler Poker were his bread and butter, and soon they would consume him.

“At first, I just thought it was really fun, and the fact you could make some money playing a card game was one of the coolest things ever,” Moorman said. “My dream job had always been a video game tester, writing for magazine or something like that. I was always really into games. The idea that you could play a card game where you could make money, play a few hours and you’d walk out with a few hundred dollars, it was groundbreaking for me. I wouldn’t say it was an addiction because it eventually became a job for me, but it was definitely an obsession. I was hooked straight away.”

It got to the point where Moorman figured he could make as much, or more, playing poker than at the summer laminating job he’d held in between his first two years at school. In between his second and final year, he weaved a tangled web of lies to his family, convincing them he was staying back at school to take a summer job at a local shop, only to be playing poker all day and watching the Ashes cricket matches with friends at night.

He did better than expected over the next few months, moving up in stakes to the $1/$2 cash games, and after meeting poker mentors David Gent and Paul Foltyn, he opened up his game and developed a more aggressive style with a bigger win rate.

“Back then the games were just so soft, it was easy,” Moorman explained. “Running bad meant booking a small loss or only breaking even. It’s not like today where a bad session means actually losing money, you don’t win every time you play and it’s really hard to win if you’re not playing your A-game.”

In between …

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