I wasn’t looking at it as an investment.”Īs Corey and Johnnie chatted, Moreno asked him ‘Can you get Saturday off?’. I had no intention in buying an $1,110 buy-in for the bartender but taking in what he was telling me and feeling this energy, with my brother having a newborn, paralleling those struggles, he was as a dad, I felt compelled to give without any expectations. “I’ve been seeing these guys for four years at the bar,” he says.

Walking into a Japanese restaurant for ramen before the weekend, Moreno started speaking to Corey, who is a bartender at the restaurant. Under his ‘Johnnie VIBES’ channel, the popular poker player and content creator is known across the whole world. Corey Peeples might not be a name steeped in former glory, but Peeples has a friend in Johnnie Moreno who everyone knows in poker. Just this past weekend, players taking on the $1,110-entry Mid Stakes Poker Tour Main Event at the Sycuan Resort would never have known who they were up against. Take a trip in a time machine back to 2018 and you wouldn’t enter a single event that saw J. Hellmuth was standing in front of you in the line, listening to his Walkman.

Go back to 1989 and the WSOP Main Event now and you wouldn’t bother registering knowing that a certain P. Players who enter them hoping that they’ll become the narrative for that particular event have no idea what they’re walking into.

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