Topic: Were you apart of the online poker scene in the early 2000’s ? (Read 208 times)

It's not that I think so, it's just the way things are, here are some points:

1. In the 2000's and especially since Moneymaker's victory in 2003 poker experienced a boom, it was an expanding market, today it is in decline, as it happens many times and it is natural in the markets. If you want growing markets, look for crypto (better Bitcoin) or AI.

2. Although poker was forbidden in the USA, nobody controlled it and many American players played on the sites, which made it very easy to win. This may seem paradoxical but the average American who entered to play was quite bad and showered the tables with money, since in the USA there was quite a tradition of poker as entertainment and it was (and still is) the country with the highest GDP in the world. After Black Friday, things changed, the markets became compartmentalized, the Americans disappeared and the market began to shrink.

3. A few years before the BF poker schools had started to emerge, which was a good idea, especially in the beginning, but it made a lot more people learn to play, which made it harder for everyone to win.

4. As a consequence of the decrease of the market, the compartmentalization and the need to pay licenses to be able to operate, the houses started to increase the rake and lower the rakeback, which lowered the profits for the players.

5. All these points made it more and more difficult to win, and it is still possible, but it is much more difficult than it was 15 or 20 years ago. The only exception were several months during the COVID when there was a recovery, where the traffic of people who didn't know how to play much increased and it was like remembering the old days. Lots of bored people at home playing poker while having a few drinks.

In conclusion if you want to play poker to pass the time do it, but if you want to start now to make poker a source of income you better focus your efforts on a growing market.

I couldn't feel how exciting it was to play poker during that era because I still didn't know anything because of age.
I found out the new poker at this time when I was involved in several types of sports betting.

From the experience of people who have been involved in games like poker before being famous for online gambling, surely the 2000s poker games are very interesting.
I am involved in online gambling because I love football that I watch every weekend. Even then, not directly on the crypto casino, but the Fiat betting site.

I was watching Pokerstars series in Tv at that time or a few years later maybe yet I am not convinced that much that poker paved the way to online gambling. I happened to work in some casinos in 2004 and they had also a sportbook which they had a version of online as well, people would sign up to play sport betting there and from what we spotted is that after a user started playing online not directly but after sometime he was playing roulette,slots and blackjack there. So I think it is online sport betting which is a predecessor to online casinos booming, it was because of online sport betting that we are here now.

Why do you think this is? I would imagine that pokers would have recovered from that legal event but it seems harder, especially for online pokers to stick and create a community.

I am not much of a poker player but want to get into it and have seen some pokers start up here on the forum but seem to lose steam after a while. Just picking up ideas before I go hunting for where to play, just for fun that is.

- Jay -

In the past, poker gambling was one type of game that I enjoyed, if you say around 2000, no, at that time I was not involved in gambling, I gambled in the era of 2017, I tried and played poker, entering 2020 I started not being interested anymore and slowly left poker for reasons that cannot be stated here.

I admit that poker is one of the games that is easy to make money from gambling, of course with the tricks and strategies that we have, of course poker is not only famous in the US, in almost every country poker is a favorite game for many people, especially those aged 40-50 and over, but even though poker today is not as great as it was in its time, poker is still a favorite for its fans. 

I've heard poker before and I think I was also in college and working a bit at that time. As we had cable, I was also watching poker tournaments during that time and yes it was explosive in that era.
Actually, this is one of the reasons that my friends and I started saving money to buy poker chips and play them at my friend's house. I know it can be played using cash but we want that feeling of playing like it is a real poker game and even if it's expensive (one set of chips) we somehow managed to complete the money to buy it.
We play on weekends from the afternoon until morning the next day. Oh God! How I miss those times.

It didn't make me start online gambling as the spark for me playing now is actually the trading sites with gambling inside. Yobit was one back in the day. Then faucets with gambling also. Freebitco.in is one.

At the time you mentioned I was too small that I could not imagine gambling. Also, right now I am not fond of poker so I have not made any search for those types of gambling. We banned all types of online gambling or only poker playing. I am sorry I am not aware as  I am not an American and I have no idea.

I remember those times when poker tournaments were being shown on TV and you could watch shows like Poker Stars. For me and my friends it was around 2008 that we got into playing together. We wouldn't go to any casinos and would feel like we suck at the game, so there would be 3 or 4 of us playing at home, getting drunk in the process. The money at stake was usually just a few bucks and the winner would buy drinks anyway. We even bought a real set of chips to feel like we're playing a high stakes game in a real casino. The sound of throwing chips on the table makes the game much better.

You know its funny now that I think of it I remember my uncle letting me play a few hands after he had to make a quick bathroom break, I was like 12 or 13 years old at the time but man I remember this fun you speak of, I was part of it for a brief moment in time & this also helped develop my keen interest in poker as I got older. My friends and I just shortly after that time in middle school when I was 14 years old would play street hockey every day after school and then go back into my buddy's house to play texas hold em for hours. Man I miss those days. Some of my fondest memories!

definitely not part of the poker scene when it started booming but I remember it being played by my relatives a lot every time there were family gatherings, I was already a huge fan of our local card games and the first time I saw them playing Texas Holdem I was instantly curious and wanted to learn the game.

I remember Zynga poker, I used to play it a lot since it was free to play and you don't really need to spend money in order to get poker chips. I also remember there were people making money off of it because there were people willing to buy poker chips from other people

Yeah you being a good bit younger than me makes sense that you wouldn't have been apart of this whole poker explosion but definitely old enough to remember it going on.  It really was like nothing else we've experienced when it comes to gambling and a casino game just blowing up the way it did.  Man it was a lot of fund though.  Constantly had poker games going at friends houses and online, I wish it would make a comeback like that.

No, I wasn't part of the online poker scene of that era because in 2000's I wasn't interested in online gambling at all. I started playing poker games in after 2010 but never betted any real money in it.

I'm still away from online poker betting but I'm good at poker as I'm a top class player of Governor of Poker game, however in that game no one bets with real money.

I actually tried some online poker games but those weren't quite good and I didn't found any good online poker games yet that I may play.

I remember staying with my family and seeing my uncle play for hours and hours on end into the night on the living room computer. I would go in a say hello and we would play texas hold em together. Those are actually some of my fondest memories with my uncle and he was always being so funny in the chat room & betting like a cowboy. I loved it.

Well, the MoneyMaker phenomenon, ESPN and WSOP, the tiltpoker games of the "broken noses", the Sunday Million on Poker Star... It was a golden age...

Ah, and the televised cash games, where these guys played for pots of thousands or millions of dollars: Poker After Dark.

Those who didn't live through it missed out on one of the most incredible phenomena in the online world, mainly linked to Poker.

^{My poker star account is from those years, OMG...It was a time when you could spend 3-4-5 hours playing poker, today...No...}.

I was busy playing sport betting which I had just encountered at that time near the 2000 year.For poker I only knew the black and red kinda poker of the slot machines of the year 2000 and had no clue about Texas Holdem at that time,in fact I learned for the first time about Texas Holdem quite some years behind in 2009 when I learned about Facebook and Zynga poker which hooked up half of the world population to say the least.In fact now that I put my brain to work I remember seeing Pokerstars on some satellite channels just before I was introduced to Facebook and its Zynga poker.I used to watch it but barely understand a thing except that people were bluffing all the time there.

However I think that what paved the way to online casinos was sport betting and slot machines much more than it was the poker on 2000.

I my case, I started playing towards the end of the decade. At that time I was already hearing about the golden age of poker in the past tense, without being aware that there were still a few good years left, basically until Poker Black Friday. From 2011 onwards, things went downhill.

I never lived in the USA and was never interested in poker and I learned about the big poker boom from books. But the description of this bubble really interested me. There is such a wonderful book - “Signal and Noise”. This book was written by forecaster Nate Silver. One of the chapters of his book is called “The Poker Bubble”. There he writes that the poker boom began in the United States in 2003. Back then, even a little skill in playing poker could provide a player with a profit, because the number of new inexperienced players grew almost exponentially. Perhaps the impetus for the formation of the bubble was an interesting fact: for the first time, the World Series of Poker was won by a 27-year-old amateur, an accountant from Nashville, Chris Moneymaker. He managed to turn $39 into $2.5 million. But in general, the nature of such phenomena always remains unclear. Like the “tulip fever” in Holland several centuries ago, so is the poker bubble in 2003.

So this will ring a bell for Americans in large part, especially those who became part of the Texas Hold’em “phenomenon” when the game blew up like I’ve never seen before. I was in college and remember @MoFough83 teaching me how to play, and falling in love.  We had games going somewhere every single night.  ESPN started broadcasting poker tournaments regularly for the first time it was so massive.

This I believe is what helped pave way to online casinos in big big way. They boom, the US banned online gambling and it rocked the whole boat.

Im just curious if anyone else remembers this time period as well and as fondly as I do. Also curious if this is what started you in online gambling like it did me.