Henry Orenstein, 98 years old, dies; Force Behind Transformers and Poker on TV

He started playing in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His game is a seven-card deck in which four face up and three face down, or hole cards, are visible only to the holder of the hand. While watching a poker tournament on television, he realized that the excitement he felt while playing was not conveying.

“He said, “This is not a game we played,” Mori Eskandani, a professional poker player who produces television poker shows, said in an interview. “‘If people could see the hole cards, they would see how great it is.”

Mr. Orenstein spent six months developing a table with miniature cameras mounted below each player’s station – non-glare panels of glass that allow the cameras to look up – that would display the hole cards and transmit the images on television. Figure. He patented the idea of ​​a hole-card camera in 1995 and got his first customer a few years later when Discovery Channel licensed it for the “World Poker Tour”.

“We call the table the ‘Holy Grail.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Orenstein is survived by a son, Mark, and a daughter, Annette. His marriage to Adele Bigajer, whom he met in a German refugee camp, ended in divorce.

In 2003, Mr. Orenstein – a competitive player who won the 1996 World Poker seven-card tournament – encouraged Jon Miller, an executive at NBC Sports, to use a hole-in-the-wall slot machine. network programs “Poker Superstars,” “Poker After Dark” and “National Guard Poker Championship”.

“He has revolutionized the game for a whole generation of poker fans who would not be able to see it as it is today without Henry’s creativity and ingenuity,” said Miller, program president of the NBC Sports Group, said in an interview.