Yeah, I started on a site that gave $10 for free, ran it up to $100 somehow, since I really didn’t know how to play, then put that onto PartyPoker with the affiliate I ended up working for. Got a free chip set and made money with the deposit bonus…rest is history.
By the time I was starting to figure out how to play was about the time party poker left the us. I made a lot of money 2008-2011, but I feel like if I had been 1-2 years earlier I would have made an order of magnitude more as I missed the golden age of party poker.
Sort of describes me as I did the same but never fully committed to poker since doing so would require dropping out of college which I didn’t want to do.
Sometimes, I do wonder what my life would have been if I dropped out and committed fully to playing professionally. Probably end up being a miserable deplorable that never left America unless it was for a poker tournament. Ick.
Probably similar to mine. I think you would’ve turned leftist and left the country eventually.
I remember voting Bush in 2004 (aged 20) then going through my Ron Paul Libertarian phase.
I had never even really considered leaving the country, but due to accumulating a ton of VPPs on Party in 2010 when I got Supernova Elite, I started doing a few MTTs abroad and got a taste for international travel. 2010 (aged 26) was the first time I even left the country.
Black Friday happened in April 2011 and then a buddy convinced me to give New Zealand’s WHV (1 year duration) a try so we could keep playing Stars. We moved there in August 2011 and I haven’t lived full-time in the USA since (although I crashed at my parents for a few 3-month stints at times while figuring out which country I’d do next).
I was pretty lazy during the easy days and then pretty much missed the boat on crypto wealth, so I haven’t saved near as much as I would like, and poker’s getting a lot more difficult and there’s RTA concerns online, but it’s still more than enough for living in lower COL places like Mexico and Thailand. The freedom it’s provided is priceless to me so I wouldn’t change anything, even if other paths had been more lucrative financially.
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Don’t forget Poker Mountain! Without that site I might not be posting on UP. I didn’t even know there were non-strategy forums on 2+2 but I think I searched for Poker Mountain when it opened and ended up in the “Banned on Poo Mountain” thread by BrownThumb, which was either on OOT or NVG. And down the rabbit hole I went.
Pretty sure I got quads in my first 15 hands on Poker Mountain and concluded it must be rogged.
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I think GamesGrid was the shadiest site I remember playing on, but I didn’t really start until like 2005
I think my first win and check was some random freeroll satellite into a 10K guaranteed tourney that I won while working an overnight shift at a radio station where my job was basically to make sure the music kept playing answer calls from people looking for requests and saying “Yeah, Ill see if we can get that on in a little bit” without ever actually playing any of the requests.
$2,400 bucks was a lot in that day, some shit site called 777 Sultans I think? Something with Sultans in it. The check was all kinds of sketchy but my bank ate it up no problem.
One of the great things about black friday is we will always remember the day because it was tax day here in the US as well. Makes the “I remember the exact day that happened” stories easy to tell.
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this one time at band camp
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Question, do you have kids or a spouse? (feel free not to answer obv) I, like LFS above, would probably be in an entirely different situation if that wasn’t top of my mind at the time. I actually started playing online really early on 2005-2006, but thats when I met my wife as well, and we had a kid in 2008, so I had to do the whole “responsible grown up” thing. I tried to take a run in January 2010 (Great timing, me!) and did well considering I played part time (only 8K tourneys, if I played full time I could have probably 4xed that.) But then, ya know, the whole thing happened.
That dip between 6.5K and 7.2K games came in February 2011 (great timing, me!)
I was also a low-to-micro stakes player, so I just played for fun and whored bonii. $5 S&Gs, $25 buy-in cash games, that sort of thing. The most I ever lost in one sitting was $100 while I was covering the 2005 WSOP final table at Binion’s. Taking a break from the action and just chilling in the media room, I bombed out on one big hand on I think AP.
I haven’t played online poker in years, but I do remember a couple games/features that I loved. Crazy Pineapple on UB was fun - despite all the shit that the site did, they had some cool features.
And PokerRoom had a team-based competition. You bought in with friends - want to say they were teams of five or six. Everyone played in their own S&G at the same time, one player per team at each table, and you won points for your team based on how you finished in your S&G. Top teams won a share of the total prize pool. I played in a league, IIRC, teaming up with people from my affiliate’s forum (again, IIRC - it was a long time ago).
I’ve never wanted to have kids and my wife is even more opposed than I am, so it’s a great fit.
I met her in Mexico City in 2019, so I’d already been a nomad for almost 8 years. Luckily for me, she’s just as excited to travel as I am and she definitively left CDMX for Madrid in Nov 2022 and we’ve been on the move together since.
But yah, it would be much much more challenging with kids or a partner who isn’t into it as much.
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They have team-based competitions now. Except now it’s teams playing against me (sans team) on the apps.
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I had a friend who made 90-100k a year for several years as a break even player purely off bonus whoring.
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Oh man, Party Poker nostalgia. So much more fun than going to class!
Villains pulling out their ethernet cable during an all-in decision so they could get to showdown for free, what a doozy of a bug that was.
loloTRICKEDU
BldSwtTrs
Tuff_Fish
I was in a low to mid stakes stable playing mostly MTTs and 180 man SnGs. I swear to god, in March 2011 I won a Stars $3 rebuy on like a Wednesday night for $8k+ and then shipped a $10 turbo MTT on FT the next week. It was an exciting time. A few weeks later, black friday hit. I still miss those long sundays multi-tabling huge MTTs.
I can’t remember the first site I started with, but my first deposit was $50 as well.
I think I played all of those and built the $50 to $2500. Downswing to $1500 then I cashed out. Also got chips and cards through Pokersource.
Yeah, it does…
I started with 50, went almost broke put in 25 more, won a 4/180 and cashed the amount i deposited out. Those first milestones were awesome. First big cash was a 7k in 11R on a friday night where i mostly played HOI2 and only played that one tourney on the side. The best cash was a 15k score on a Sunday. I went to bed my friend went to work. That was an awesome feeling. A little later I got staked because I wanted to move up. I had a really tight BRM so making the jump to the 100s wasnt easy if you always cash out something of your biggest scores. Just didnt want to end up with nothing to show for. Needless to say I never split during my staked days. I went down 15k grinded my way back up to zero and went down. At some point my staker stopped the business and I got rid of around 30k makeup. We had a poker flat for a year in Malta. One of my friends back then went for SNE which was probably the right choice. I just never put in the time necessary outside of playing and so the game overtook me.
My first big score was 16k final tabling Ultimate Bets big Sunday mtt. My family still thought I was absolutely insane at that point. Then I got 2nd in a ftops for $50k. But I made most of my money playing Msnl, hsnl, and msplo. Eventually I told my parents I was finishing whatever degree I could get the quickest/easiest and playing poker for a living. My mom did not take that well. I did supernova elite one year. It probably cost me money by grinding mindlessly. I can still remember vividly waking up and firing up my computer on 4/15/2011 and getting the message. After that I only played pcas until they ended, and wsop main events. But I haven’t played a hand of poker since the 2021 main event. I have insane run good in Wsop Main events, cashed 5/11 and finished top 100 3 times. I should probably start playing them again.
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I think we might be twins switched at birth
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