When Canadian online poker player Jonathan Duhamel won the WSOP Main Event in November, 2010, it was a huge boost to the online poker industry in his home country. Thousands of young aspiring poker players were encouraged by Duhamel’s success on the world stage of poker, and seeing a fellow Canadian take the championship motivated many to try their luck at the game.

At this year’s WSOP Main Event, Pius Heinz became the first German to take first place, and many people expect that his victory will inspire a number of German online poker players to pursue the game in hopes of achieving similar success. Both Duhamel and Heinz inspired their fellow citizens to become engaged in the online poker industry, but while they are the most recent examples of how the WSOP main event winner can influence a nation, they were not the first. Back in 2003, American Chris Moneymaker began a huge online poker boom in the United States, inspiring possibly millions of people to pursue online poker and poker as a whole.

If Germany experiences the same patter as Canada did this past year, or as the United States did back in 2003, it goes to show that the World Series of Poker does indeed have massive, global effect on the poker industry and fans of the sport.