Chris Moorman and Katie Lindsay enjoyed Mexico so much that they bought themselves a new home there to make the online poker grind easier to access.

Over the course of the 2020 World Series of Poker, PocketFives has been checking in with Chris Moorman and Katie Lindsay as they chase down WSOP glory. This is Episode 5 of The House of Moorman.

In the days before Black Friday, American politicians loved to get all cute when discussing the evils of online gaming. “Click a mouse, lose a house!” became a popular refrain amongst the biggest proponents of a ban on online gaming. Well, during their recent trip to Mexico to play the 2020 World Series of Poker Online, the Moormans did the exact opposite, both literally and figuratively.

Chris Moorman and Katie Lindsay headed to  Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico in early August to get on GGPoker. Chris found success very early, finishing second in Event #58 ($5,000 Six NLHE Championship) for $398,393. A few weeks later, Chris and Katie were putting the finishing touches on purchasing a home not far from the one they were renting for the summer.

“Chris needs to be out of the country a lot when he wants to play online, and instead of just always having to go to different, random locations, we really liked Puerto Villarta,” Katie said. “So, I started looking around in there and I saw there were these new homes. They’re identified as condos, but they’re individual houses with their own pool, and the price was pretty good, considering what you get for it. So, we went and looked at it and we both really liked it.”

Katie liked the place the moment she walked in. Chris might have liked it, but wasn’t going to reveal that to the real estate agent or Katie.

“He looked at it and he didn’t make a face, he didn’t react. He got in the car and I’m like… ‘So?’ I didn’t know if didn’t want to show his cards in front of the agents or whatever. He still gave me nothing,” Katie said. “I go on about my day and two hours later, I come home and he says, ‘All right, I want to get it’.”

This doesn’t mean Chris and Katie are going to be up and leaving their adopted home town of Las Vegas any time soon. The new house gives the couple a vacation getaway spot that also allows them to play online poker on sites not available to American players.

“We can use this as a vacation rental to people, you can rent them out when we’re not there. We can have it as a home anytime we need to be out of the country to play online poker. It’s a great spot,” Katie said. “Chris’s dad was supposed to be coming over to visit and see our Vegas home in October, and because of COVID, he can’t fly here, but we realized they can go to Mexico, so that’s a place we could all meet up.”

There will be one other advantage this house has over the Las Vegas one though.

“No more renovations,” Chris joked.

“It’s all brand new,” Katie said. “(The agent) wanted to show us one other place, and we went to it, and I walked in and was like ‘Absolutely not’. The kitchen looked like it was from the 70s. It was very brown, with wood panelling.”

The house they’re renting and the one they’ve purchased are both great, but it wasn’t just a set of fully renovated bathrooms that sold them on spending more time in Nuevo Vallarta. Over the last several weeks, they’ve come to like the area after spending time exploring their surrounding amenities.

“We agreed to take a day off. I think it was a Friday … There was no bracelet event on, so we went and rented a boat out in the morning. Although, the first few hours, it was raining and miserable, and they wanted to go some snorkelling and it was cloudy and everyone was kind of a bit grumpy from getting up early,” Chris said. “We stopped off at this restaurant on the beach that’s a locals beach, and the weather turned around, and actually on the way home, it was really nice and sort of turned around and spirits were increased. But it was nice to get out because we’d just been grinding so much all day, every day.”

They’ve also made time to enjoy some of the nightlife the resort town has to offer. Housemate Joseph Cheong stumbled into a place and figured it might make Moorman feel right at home.

Aptly named, ‘The Queen’, Chris and the rest of their crew only stayed around for a quick drink. Despite the house hunting, boat trips, and bar hopping, there’s still work to be done on the felt.

Despite all of the accolades Chris has earned in his online poker career – $15 million in earnings, more Triple Crowns than anybody else – he’s never won the PokerStars Sunday Million. He had a shot at changing that on August 16. Having worked his way through 10,813 other entries in the event, just two players stood in his way of taking the crown of what was once considered to be the pinnacle of the Sunday Majors.

“(The Sunday Million) has always been something that I’d wanted to win, even though it was kind of a different tournament to what it used to be. I made Day 2 of that and still 90 players left,” Chris said. “Then I was almost out with 15 left, and kind of maybe should have won because I was one of three and I didn’t know the other guys, but they were playing decently well. I have no complaints really coming from me, and it’s from $100 turning into nearly $60,000.”

The bracelet events haven’t been as fruitful over the past few weeks, but Moorman did manage to make Day 2 of the $5,000 Main Event. He turned that stack into $11,834.04 thanks to a 662nd place finish which most players would be thrilled with, but Chris fired the maximum three bullets and actually ended up down for the event.

While Katie returned to Las Vegas to help push along the process of purchasing the house, Chris is sticking around Nuevo Vallarta through the final week of WSOP events which overlaps with the start of the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker.