There are certainly a whole host of poker players who came along in the last ten years who didn’t experience Black Friday or if you started playing decently recently barely know what rakeback is? We all have different paths to how to find your first poker player at poker sites not on Gamstop UK, but I will share my journey and some fun memories and some a little worse.
The undersigned has been playing internet poker since about the end of 2003 and has some fun memories I’d like to share with you, and hopefully, there are plenty of fun events of your own that you can fill in the comments.
Introduction
I’m old enough that I actually started my poker career online via “dial-up modem” and since most of my friends didn’t have internet, several of them played at Poker Sites Not on Gamstop UK while I was at work, which led to an internet bill that would add up to an electric bill any day today pales in comparison.
The single table 10-man sit-n-go (SnG) offering was the only tournament format with a minimum buy-in of $5.50 where prize money was always split 50-30-20% of the pot.
For me, it was $22 that attracted the most, probably because the first price in one of those broke the $100 barrier but when it did, you were down to $11 and raked to work the roll back up so you could take some occasional shot at the $100 level.
But jeez, what a tight man he was then.
My first $100 SnG I ever played I basically folded to third place and it almost felt like winning the lottery when you mincashed.
The strategy of playing SnG back then was very different and it was not uncommon to have big all-ins with 30-40bb and it was A7 vs KJ that had found its way into the pot.
Remember, for example, that when Stop n Go came, it was revolutionary and very effective if you were a short stack. What is meant by stop n go was simply explained that if, for example, you sat in the big blind with only 8bb and the button raised to 3bb, you called instead of going all-in and then you put your 5bb first into the pot regardless of the board because the chance was greater to get folded on the flop than before when many only played the cards in the hand and pot odds were not yet common knowledge.
We are therefore talking about a time when no one knew what a range was and the best information was found in book form which was written many years ago even back then.
People who are not in the poker world do not understand how much poker sites not on Gamstop UK have developed in the last twenty years and it is difficult to explain to a person who is not in the know at all.
Would say that on average poker sites not on Gamstop UK players looked at what they had in their hand and what was on the table. Then you knew how big the chance was of putting a flush or straight if you flopped a move like that. After that, most people’s knowledge ran out.
You can understand for yourself how far ahead you would be if you were allowed to travel in a time machine to that time with today’s knowledge of poker and game theory.
Skins & Other Poker Sites Not on GamStop UK
Multipoker started in 2003 and was a skin for partypoker which meant that the graphics were the same but they had their own player base which was of course much smaller than what you were used to. Since the owners were from the same city as me, it was natural that I moved the game over there and we had many fun poker trips under the Multipoker flag, but that will be another story.
In terms of games, there were now also multi-table tournaments and withdrawals to bank accounts only took a couple of days, which was incredible.
The absolute most popular was a $1 rebuy which always drew lots of people and the chat was hot all the time. It was a bit like a community, you could say, where you cheered each other on and supported each other. The era of expletives and where bad games were heckled had not yet entered the market.
The big “star” of the poker site not on GamStop UK, if you can call it that, even though it wasn’t about millions, was Neon Light. He was always extremely nice and understood early on that you had to get along well with the fishermen and I think he laughed all the way to the bank because he was horse lengths ahead of everyone else in development. He inspired me so much that my nick on Multipoker became NeoSlayer because we all chased him all the time.
Other Poker Sites Not on GamStop UK in the Market
PokerStars and later Full Tilt were the two other big dragons in the market along with partypoker. They would choose slightly different paths forward, which meant that partypoker lost a huge amount of traffic as they followed the directives from the USA and stopped all play from American players, while Full Tilt and PokerStars did the opposite. Right or wrong with hindsight is not that hard to figure out considering how big PokerStars is and has been all along since 2005 and on.
Full Tilt was followed, as most people know, by a big scandal where to explain it very simply, they did not have coverage for the players’ money but rather spent a little more than they could actually afford. Many poker players’ lives were completely turned upside down by the closing of Full Tilt and some went from financially carefree to broke overnight.
This led to some quitting poker altogether, some falling into deep depression and tragically, there were stories of those who even chose to end their lives.
