Well, seeing as how it's now been around 5 years since the true 2003-2006 "Golden Age" of online poker (and casinos, for those of us who bonus-whored them), not to mention that it's now a new decade, I think we are now officially entitled to some actual bona fide nostalgia for the bygone days of online poker and the more innocent overall poker world of the mid 2000s.

I'll start: remember the monthly Party reloads, $100 bonuses for playing 500 raked hands?

Remember when Stars was considered a "tournament site"?

Remember when Paradise was the top of the heap, and the target of the original "rigged" conspiracy theories?

Remember tablefuls of fish at 1/2 NL?

Remember when damn near half the players at any given Omaha 8 table below 5/10 literally didn't know the rules, much less how to play decently?

Let's hear some nostalgia.

Pontoon. Easy way to clear casino bonuses and could get very streaky leading to big wins or losses.

scatter rams.

Ah, I remember the good times back in the day before Omaha Chris was posting...it was so much better then.

I was on RGP during those years, and resisted 2+2 on principle!

We called it "Four" back then.

Hyuk hyuk

Bonus whoring 4 digit 5x bonuses on endless B2B sites when I first started playing online was awesome.

remember when highest tables was .05/1 NL at party... and nody played more than 4 tables.......... 5-10Nl at stars but no more than 2 or 3 tables at peak times anyway...

Two words: Pacific Poker.

Jesus, those were the biggest mongoloid ****brain players that ever existed. Worst players online, from the day they opened for business to the day UIGEA came down.

And you could only 1-table!

Crypto monthlies. Stickying Party CRBs. Several-hundred-dollar Ongame reloads that you could clear in a day - and they gave you extra money for doing it. Endless E600 B2B signups playing headsup Triple Draw against players who didn't know the rules, and kept playing even so. Bonuses everywhere that stacked, never expired, and sometimes even cleared concurrently.

Is the Mansion Steelers freeroll too late for nostalgia? Kind of marks the end of the era as far as I'm concerned.

I even miss Neteller.

Also, Ongame, UB, and Bodog all used to have software that didn't suck.

I miss the old Doyle's Room. I signed in after reading Super System, I thought all players there have read it. Then I got to play Doyle himself and bluffed him out of the pot twice! My God those games were soft. Too bad I wasn't that great either.

I think there's a high degree of causation between the facts mentioned in the second and third paragraph.

Yeah, Tribeca network was awesome. That and Paradise. And the Crypto GBP tables back then.

I remember when I was donating money to everyone on these forums...

Oh baby, the Crypto monthlies.

I remember one night when I was working on one of those at Intercasino and decided to try something different besides blackjack and jumped into casino solitaire.

I went on an unusually good run, which turned into an all-night bender, and I ultimately decided at 4:30 AM that I had stumbled upon a foolproof "solution" to the game, that I might very well turn the game into an ATM, and that the only reason Windows solitaire had been so hard is because it was rigged. After all, the house edge in this game had never been calculated, maybe I really DID discover something!

Needless to say, the illusion was shattered quickly and efficiently.

One thing that remained consistent from then to now was Full Tilt's $600 signup bonus/reloads.

IIRC, the terms and the play-through have always been exactly the same.

Back in the day Full Tilt was barely considered viable. On BonusWhores we'd chortle at the people who bothered with their bonuses, like it was the absolute last refuge of the junkies who had already done everything else.

Now people do backflips when they offer a reload like it's a gift from heaven.

BonusWhores...ahh, the days when I used to check the forums there constantly.

I haven't checked in there for a year or two - I suppose I really should go have a look again.

I started playing just too late to have experienced the Real Old Days, but I still have some good memories:

- Weekly $1 rebuy tournament on Golden Palace Poker with $3000 added for first place. Usually had about 150 runners, many didn't even bother to rebuy after busting out in the rebuy period. Won it twice. Playing heads-up was exciting: either win $3300 or $200.

- I used to have a few thousand Euro in debt. Solved it through casinobonuswhoring. Blackjack, pontoon, and (if necessary) jacks or better, or casino war. Especially the juicy sticky bonuses were fun: lose faaaaast or win biiiiiiiig. Had fun for a few years with some nice monthly bonuses (Intercasino, CasinoEuro, and others) before they all died out. Juiciest was a Dutch-language casino with approximately bi-monthly reloads and a 15x clearing rate (very good for the time). Too bad their software was mega-slow, and they banned me from getting bonuses after two three years.

- Bodog having excellent software, and "upgrading" it to some unplayable piece of poo. They kept telling it was just a matter of time before we would get used to the new software and we appreciate it. Uhm, no. OnGame did a nice tribute to this a few months ago.

- PokerStars not having a first-deposit bonus.

- Dissolving of the Tribeca network. Skins kept leaving each day, and for a few days(?) guaranteeds on tournaments stayed the same, causing massive overlays.

- Mansion free football bet.

- Daily $100 tournament on Mansion Poker with $100K guaranteed. Usually a $40K overlay. Cost me a lot of money. After they went to OnGame, these tournaments became network-wide pretty quickly, causing the overlay to go away. Was better for my bankroll, probably.

- Me not knowing about affiliates/kickbacks/rakeback at the time. That cost me a lot of money, by signing up to sites directly.

i just came
i used to 3 table bodogs 5/10 nl and 1 table pacific 5/10 at the same time
bodog had ****ing braindead players but i would make about double on pacifc what i made per bodog table month after month
i actually was looking thru and old computer and i used to use pokertracker back then
i had a ****ton of hands from pacific on their and playing like a vag with a 16 vpip i beat it for 13bb/100

Boss network in 2005-2006 and their turkish megafish Brings a tear to my eye. I made $10k in my first month of playing nl200, and only 5-tabling.

Bodog having excellent software, and "upgrading" it to some unplayable piece of poo. They kept telling it was just a matter of time before we would get used to the new software and we appreciate it. Uhm, no. OnGame did a nice tribute to this a few months ago.

yea that **** was horrendous
typical bodog

also i loved paradise
as mention before i played a ton of bodog and pacific,paradise would pick up for some reason after those sites died down, at about 7am till noon
1-2 was the highest game running and was easily beatable for 30 bucks an hr per table
the chat was great to bc u could curse someone out and the words would come out across the table
i remember some idiot named splits87 donating there for days,guys would shred 3-4 like it was nothing
one time i stacked 6 people on one had on a k 8 4 flop with pockets 8s
it was truely glorious

Monster and all the corny Party Poker commercials that sent the fish flocking to there computers...

oh yea no pole smoking 24 tabling hud bots ruining the game with their break even bull****

Well, they are just playing for money. In case You are playing for fun or wanting to excel as a poker player, 24-tabling nits are Your best opponents - it is easy to beat fish, however against nits You have to make at least some adjustments and think about Your game...If You hate them, You must be the very similar to those 24-tabling nits, only without ability to 24-table.

Latvian_guy,
5-tabling uNL grinder

I remember when The Gaming Club (former Prima/Microgaming) had a no-deposit bonus that doled out $20 every 100 raked hands, up to something like $220. I was on a business trip and before I went to bed, I hooked up my laptop to the hotel phone, 5-tabled $0.50/$1 fixed-limit hold'em on dial-up and brought in $100 in bonuses while somehow winning at every table.