Mark Scheinberg: From PokerStars to a Luxury Hospitality Empire

Mark Scheinberg helped build PokerStars into the largest online poker company on Earth, survived a US federal crackdown that indicted his own father, and sold the business for $4.9 billion in 2014. Then he did something few founders in his position ever do: he walked away from gambling completely. Through his investment firm Mohari, he has spent the years since buying into luxury hotels, a yacht line, and one of the biggest restaurant and nightlife groups in the world, a second act most coverage of his PokerStars years never mentions.

What did Mark Scheinberg do after he sold PokerStars?

He left the gambling industry entirely and started over in luxury hospitality and real estate. In 2017, three years after the PokerStars sale closed, Scheinberg founded Mohari, an investment firm built around a simple idea: put the proceeds from selling the world's biggest poker platform into physical, high-end assets rather than another gambling venture.

That choice is the part of his story that gets the least attention. Most write-ups of Mark Scheinberg stop at the Amaya Gaming deal, treat the payday as the ending, and move on. What came after is close to a second career, built almost entirely outside the industry that made him rich in the first place.

What has Mohari Hospitality bought?

A controlling or outright stake in some of the more recognizable names in luxury travel and dining, mostly acquired rather than built from scratch.

Mohari has kept pushing into similar territory since. In 2024 it outbid LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault for full ownership of Venice's historic Bauer Hotel, a deal reported to have gone for roughly $309 million more than Arnault's own offer. None of it touches a card table or a slot reel. It is hotels, yachts, and restaurants, funded by money a poker platform generated.

Where did Mark Scheinberg grow up, and how did he end up building poker software?

He was born in Israel and moved to Toronto as a teenager, following his father Isai, who had built a career as a software engineer. Isai Scheinberg spent years as a senior programmer at IBM, including a stretch on the team that helped develop Unicode, the character-encoding standard now running underneath nearly every computer system in the world.

In 2000, Isai left IBM to build poker software of his own. His original plan was to license it to companies already running gambling sites. Nobody wanted it. A career spent writing infrastructure other engineers relied on did not translate into interest from an industry that had never heard of him.

Why did father and son end up building PokerStars themselves?

Because nobody else would take the software, so they built the platform around it instead. At 28, Mark teamed up with his father, and PokerStars went live in 2001. Neither of them came from the poker world in a conventional sense. Mark has never played the game professionally himself, and Isai's background was in enterprise software, not casino operations.

What made PokerStars beat its early rivals?

It skipped the gimmicks other operators leaned on and focused on three unglamorous things: software that did not break, payouts that arrived fast, and large-scale online tournaments players could trust to run honestly. That combination sounds obvious in hindsight. At the time, plenty of competitors were spending their energy on flashy promotions instead of the underlying product. By the time Mark was 33, PokerStars had become the biggest name in online poker.

What happened to PokerStars on Black Friday in 2011?

The US Department of Justice shut down the country's largest online poker operators in a single coordinated action, and PokerStars was one of them. As part of that case, prosecutors indicted Isai Scheinberg. Mark was not charged. PokerStars itself kept operating outside the US, stayed solvent, and repaid every dollar of player money owed from its American business. It also bought its struggling rival Full Tilt Poker, largely to help return funds to that site's own stranded players after Full Tilt's finances collapsed in the same crackdown.

What happened to Isai Scheinberg's criminal case?

He avoided arrest for almost a decade, then pleaded guilty to a single charge in 2020, about nine years after the original indictment. Isai Scheinberg was one of 11 people charged in the 2011 Black Friday case, facing counts that included operating an illegal gambling business, bank fraud, and money laundering. He stayed out of US custody for years, was eventually detained in Switzerland in 2019, and pleaded guilty in March 2020 to a single count of operating an illegal gambling business. That September, a US federal judge sentenced him to time served and a $30,000 fine, closing out the last major unresolved piece of the Black Friday case.

How much did Mark Scheinberg make when PokerStars finally sold?

In 2014, Amaya Gaming bought PokerStars' parent company, Rational Group, for $4.9 billion in an all-cash deal, and Mark's personal share alone was reportedly worth more than $3 billion. The mechanics of that deal, including how a company smaller than PokerStars itself managed to pull off the purchase, are covered in full in Amaya Gaming buys PokerStars, the $4.9 billion deal explained.

How rich is Mark Scheinberg today?

Estimates vary, but most land somewhere between $5.6 billion and $6.6 billion, all of it now separate from the gambling business that built the original fortune.

He is not the only builder-turned-billionaire to reinvent the second half of a career this way. Denise Coates built Bet365 out of a portacabin in a car park and never left betting, while the founders of Stake.com skipped outside investors entirely and are still running the business they built. Scheinberg's path stands out because he took the opposite route from all of them: he cashed out completely and rebuilt somewhere else.

The bottom line

PokerStars is the part of Mark Scheinberg's story that gets told the most, and it is also the part that ended over a decade ago. He and his father built a platform nobody would license to them, turned it into the biggest name in online poker on the strength of software and payouts rather than promotions, survived a federal crackdown that indicted Isai and not Mark, and sold it for $4.9 billion. Everything since then, the hotels, the yacht stake, the restaurant group, happened after he chose to leave the industry that made him a billionaire in the first place.

That is also a useful reminder for anyone building in this space today. The biggest long-term payoff in iGaming often goes to whoever builds the platform underneath the business, not just the operator at the table. If launching your own brand sounds more realistic than founding the next PokerStars, a white label casino platform gets you live on infrastructure that already works. See our pricing for what that costs today.