Updated:
Save
Chess has always depended on the generosity of its wealthiest fans. We could go back to Alfonso X the Wise already the Borgia. Jacqueline Piatigorskysingle Rothschildwatered the best boards in the United States with his fortune in the 1960s. The British investor Jim Slater saved the World Cup in Iceland between Fischer y Spassky in 1972, by doubling the prize pool. The American businessman Red Sinquefield has turned San Luis into the capital of world chess. The last billionaire on the board is the most mysterious of everyone. From Isai Scheinberg less is known than about many spies, although his links with Spain are public: his son Mark bought half of the Canalejas complex in 2017
in Madrid. “Now I play a lot of chess, that makes me happy,” says the man who founded Pokerstars in 2001 and who thirteen years later sold the company for 4,600 million euros.
The Scheinbergs have now just signed a sponsorship contract with the International Federation until 2026. In the midst of war and with a Russian president who is critical of Putin, FIDE will thus be able to organize its main competitions without constraints. This year, the most important is the candidates tournament, which will be played at the Palacio de Santoña in Madrid from June 16, with a budget of close to two million euros. Eight of the best grandmasters in the world will fight for the right to challenge the world champion, Magnus Carlsen.
But back to Isai Scheinberg, probably the billionaire with the fewest biography lines on Wikipedia. It doesn’t help much that he’s only given two or three interviews in his life. With all that is unknown about Isai, it doesn’t even matter that much if he was born in 1946 or 1947, if he was born in Israel and his family moved to Lithuania, or if he actually went the other way. It is known at least that he studied mathematics in Moscow, thanks to a scholarship and after working as a cleaner to help the family economy. He later moved to Israel, where he was drafted into the Army and participated in the war of attrition of 1967 and in the Yom Kippur of 1973. He helped above all to create new weapons, highly valued for their great precision. At night, he also learned the secrets of poker, where he made a name for himself as an aggressive and hard-to-beat player.
His first important job was as a programmer for IBM, first in Israel and then in Toronto. There he was one of the developers of the system Unicodenow universal, which allows computers to transmit and display texts in different languages.
But Scheinberg was very drawn to the world of poker. He even treated himself to one of the 1996 World Series tournaments in Las Vegas. He finished 25th out of 267 players, earning him a $3,337 prize. As in the joke, it was almost what he played, but his adventures on the mats inspired the business of his life. In the year 2000 he founded the software company PYRgerm of the future PokerStars, which was born in 2001 with the help of his son Mark and former colleagues at IBM. In 2004 she took her from Costa Rica to the Isle of Man, but her adventure almost cost her jail for continuing to operate in the United States after she administrationBush banned gambling on the Internet in 2006. He could not set foot in the country for a decade, until he decided to turn himself in after reaching an out-of-court settlement.
The relationship between the Scheinberg family and chess goes back a long way. Matafiafather of Isai, was an outstanding player and represented Lithuania in two Chess Olympiads: Hamburg 1930 and Prague 1031. Better than his millions, the tycoon keeps a book in which several grandmasters analyze his father’s games. With what they learned at PokerStars, Isai and Mark participated in the development of Chess.comone of the leading online chess portals, which has just been banned in Russia for its anti-war editorial line.
Isai Scheinberg has also been the main sponsor of the tournament Isle of Man Openwhere PokerStars moved its headquarters in 2005. Since 2019, the competition has been part of the World Championship cycle, under the name of FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss. The Scheinbergs also created the Scheinberg Relief Fund in 2020, to which they contributed 50 million dollars to combat the effects of the pandemic, and have given significant aid to various charities related to animals and the conservation of the planet.
See them
comments
