Henry Orenstein

Something strange happened to poker in 2003: the card game became a spectator sport. All of a sudden, you couldn't turn on ESPN without seeing men (and rarely women) hunched over a card table... and other sports and sport-adjacent TV channels followed suit.

There were two reasons for the perfect storm: the aptly-named amateur Chris Moneymaker won the main event at the 2003 World Series of Poker, showing the masses that even they can succeed in the game (they can't), and the invention of the hole camera that allowed those masses to see the game as it happened.

If one tried to watch televised poker pre-2003 (one shouldn't), one would not know what cards the players are holding. Would you enjoy watching your friends play cards without participating yourself? No, and the people on TV are not your friends! But the insertion of the camera allowed the viewer at home to see what each player was holding, making them feel like they were an active participant. It was a groundbreaking change.

The man behind that invention, Henry Orenstein, was a poker player himself, who won a World Series bracelet in 1996. He was also a Holocaust survivor who somehow got through five concentration camps, and a toy manufacturer who convinced Hasbro to create a line of toys in 1984 that continue to be popular to this day, even as televised poker has long fizzled out.

Transformers.