Henry Orenstein

Holocaust survivor Henry Orenstein is the creator and executive producer of "Poker Superstars."

He is also an inventor of toys with over 100 patents in his name and he convinced the Hasbro toy company to begin manufacturing Transformers: action figures that morph from wheeled vehicles into robots. Today, he says, they are among the two or three best-selling boys' toy of all time. Orenstein is now one of the top poker players in America today. When poker first came to television, the audience sizes were very small. Upon seeing this Henry discovered that it was because that no one could see the pocket cards of the players. Nobody is interested in seeing a poker game without knowing who has what. With this in mind, Henry, with a team of engineers, set out to design a table that would have "hidden" cameras that would capture the players' pocket cards. At the end of 5 months the table was finished. If not for this invention, poker probably would have taken many more years to become the boom that it is now...or maybe not even at all.

Orenstein spent the better part of WWII living in a series of Nazi concentration camps, staying alive by a spot in a special "kommando" of Jewish "mathematicians" al though he was no genius at mathematics. "I was very lucky, at one point, the runners were running around calling out for Jewish scientists, mathematicians, etc. to register. "At that time, we'd heard that days before they killed off all 17,000 Jewish inmates in Majdanek, so I thought our turn is coming, and to play for time, I registered myself and my three brothers as scientists and mathematicians, even though we were not. Just gambling for time. It turned out to be a good gamble. Any 8 or 9 year-old could have done the arithmetic he was asked to perform while working for the squad."

In 1996, Orenstein gambled his way to victory at the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino World Championship in Limit Seven-Card-Stud, winning $130,000 for a $5,000 entrance fee.

"Poker is a very fascinating game. You have many elements that go into making a good poker player," he says. "You have to be able to calculate odds, you have to read other players' faces and movements, what they call 'tells', that tell you what kind of a hand they have and also you have to have a good memory to remember cards."