Poker Game Tips

They were the cards on hand when online poker fired its opening salvo across the bow of the establishment and now they can be yours. Tying in with the hype associated with this weekend’s final table, the deck of cards used in the World Series of Poker Main Event in 2003 in which online poker player Chris Moneymaker defeated Sam Farha, has been put up for auction on eBay.

If you don’t know the story, Moneymaker won a seat in the $10,000 WSOP Main Event via a $40 satellite tournament on an online poker site. The field in 2003 consisted of just 839 players. Following Moneymaker’s dramatic win, 2004 saw the field dramatically jump to 2,575, an increase of over 300%. The player buy-ins also shot up in 2005 with 5,619, doubling the number of entries in 2004 and increasing by seven times the number of players in the year Moneymaker took home the bracelet.

The seller is said to be a former employee of the casino, “working behind the scenes at Binion’s Horseshoe.” According to the listing, after receiving permission from his bosses to take the deck, the smart employee “carefully placed all of the cards from that final hand on top of the rest of the deck, kept in sequence, along with the dealer’s cut card, and put the complete deck back into the double Kem box along with the unused deck.”

The auction is currently on eBay with a starting bid of $7,500. Nobody has plunked down the money yet, but it’s got three days to go. Take a look at the auction for yourself!