According to his relatives, Henry Orenstein, the creator of Transformers and Poker on TV, died at the age of 98. He began his career as a musician in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His game was seven-card stud, in which four cards face up and three face down, or hole cards, are seen only to the hand’s holder. He recognised the enthusiasm he had when playing was not being transmitted while watching a poker event on television.
In an interview, Mori Eskandani, a professional poker player who also produces televised poker programmes, remarked, “This isn’t the game we played.” “‘Everyone would see how fantastic it is if they could see the hole cards.'”
Henry Orenstein, worked for six months on a table with small cameras positioned under each player’s station — cutouts with non-glare glass that let the cameras to gaze up — that would display the hole cards and broadcast the pictures on television. On 1995, he patented his hole-card camera concept, and a few years later, the Discovery Channel licenced it for use in their “World Poker Tour.”
Mr. Eskandani explained, “We nicknamed the table ‘the Holy Grail.'”
Henry Orenstein, is survived by a son, Mark, and a daughter, Annette, in addition to his wife. His marriage to Adele Bigajer ended in divorce after he met her at a displaced people camp in Germany.
Henry Orenstein, a professional poker player who won the 1996 World Series of Poker seven-card stud tournament, persuaded NBC Sports executive Jon Miller to employ the hole-card camera table on the network’s shows “Poker Superstars,” “Poker After Dark,” and “National Heads-Up Poker Championship” in 2003.
Mr. Miller, the head of programming for the NBC Sports Group, stated in an interview that “he transformed the game for an entire generation of poker aficionados who would not be able to experience it as it is without Henry’s innovation and brilliance.”
