Out of the Laboratory by Henry Orenstein

Poker innovaor Henry Orenstein discusses his second-greatest discovery after Transformers.

I won the world championship of Stud at Binion's in 1993 and I was at the final table a year later. I only competed there for a few years, though. One of the reasons I don't compete there anymore is because now there are so many people playing. It's just a lot to handle. You get on bad hand and you lose it and you're out of the tournament. The World Series now has a lot of money, huge money, but it's a lottery. Even top-notch players have no chance of winning. As far as really well-known players winning the World Series, it hasn't happened in a few years. This is all due to the explosion in poker.

I patented the pocket cam on television poker. That's why I am responsible for the whole poker craze. My invention made it possible for viewers to see the closed cards on TV. Before, people playing poker weren't making much money. Now thousands of them are becoming millionaires. Watching it on television was very boring. That's why I though of it. I was watching it on ESPN, and for four or five hands in a row they couldn't show the closed cards, and the players just folded the hands. You couldn't see what was going on. I said, "If they could show the closed cards, it would be a lot more exciting."

That really is how it started; I was just sitting at home. I was watching it on ESPN, and after 10 minutes I turned it off. It really could have been so much better with cameras showing the closed cards and sending it to TV's in homes everyhwere. It took us about four or five months to perfect a camera system that did that. We had all kinds of models tested.

I have the patent, so when people don't believe me about this, I just show it to them. When I first came up with the idea, I was hoping that it would become this huge. We tested it out with different players and our own group, and we knew it was good and sold it to NBC. So when I watch it on television, it's very satisfying.

The poker pros originally thought that it was a bad idea. They were very reluctant to reveal how they played, but I showed them how it would translate to TV. I spoke to them, I know most of them, and they said, "I don't know if I want to share my way of playing with the general public." I was talking with Doyle Brunson and Barry Greenstein and Johnny Chan.

It was originally sold to the Travel Channel by the World Poker Tour, but then they were infringing on our patent. So, after some conversation, they agreed to pay us a royalty. We went to NBC and CBS and sold it to Fox Sports and the Game Show Network. The future right now for these shows is what we're seeing on the Game Show Network, where players play for their own money, which is very interesting. It's different when you put up $120,000 of your own money in a tournament. But I would say that, in terms of how lucrative the ideas were, the pocket cam has a way to go to catch up with Transformers.

I found Transformers and made the whole thing happen. I was walking through a showroom in 1983, and I saw a Japanese company that had these little robots. I happened to know the president of the compnay. I convinced him that an American company with American marketing could do much better than their own subsidiaries. In the beginning he was hesitant, but I convinced him that he'd be better off, which he was. I introduced him to Hasbro, and I was part of the deal to bring the company to America.

I have close to 100 patents to my name, and in the middle of June last year I was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame. I also have a patent for Johnny Lightning cars, which we came up with in 1969. I also invented Dolly Surprise, which is a doll that grows hair when you move one of her arms. I also have a patent for football, to help determine whether it is a first down or not, but I have some more work to do on it. I would say the pocket cam, Transformers, and Johnny Lightning are my favorites.