Absolute did. They'd have a 5 or 6 thousand player freeroll every half hour, and the top few players would win a buck or two. That's how I started my bankroll, grind those freerolls til I binked, then try to spin it up on the 1c/2c tables. Eventually it stuck. My roll now is a direct continuation from those Absolute freerolls, I've never supplemented it with real world money since.

same, of all my no deposit challenges, absolute was by far the easiest

/crying

I think one poster mentioned that he didn't trust it, but it was so bizarrely soft.

You'd sit there for waiting for aces, jam money into the pot and somehow they still wouldn't believe you.

Aim chat dings

Ultimatebet used to have an AIM type messenger app where you could add fish to it so you knew when they were online playing.

calling support at WSEX and having them install new tables at limits of 75-150 to 400-800 at lhe and o8 when the biggest avail game anywhere was 60-120 (pre-ub era)

AIM chatting w erik123 when he was winning 5k/day playing 20 40 lhe on paradise

having 5+ accounts on all major sites and the challenge of figuring out who you were playing based on attention to detail and talent

running <1k in account into >500k dozens of times (including a few in the same multi-day sessions)

the days when david singer, chufty and durr would play multiple tables of 1500 3k or 2k 4k horse or 8 game

tilting off bankroll after bankroll to matt hawrilenko

humiliating richard brodie, sally woo and kpr16 at lhe

bixiu and easy peasy clicking buttons at oe

durr 5 tabling 500 1000 2-7 on stars

isildurs rise and apex playing PA Pi and Durr simultaneously on 9 tables

filling screens w bets and raises on 12(?) bet/street max limit games on UB

thomas keller crushing era

whenever checking plo side seeing rast and cole south with impossible looking stacks on every table seemingly every time at 25 50 plo

200 400 tryhards at stars lhe

regular hopeless drop ins at 3 600 to 1 2k hu mixed games

interpoker (william hill skin?) where you could play in pounds, euros or dollars... the rake was the same 3?) but people would play equivalent limits but in the currency where they would pay double rake

getting flagrantly cheated at pokertropolis but stubbornly redepositing for hours and hours and hours over and over

NETTELLER!!!!!!!!!

Who and/or how were you cheated?

I miss the Mike Matusow face avatar on Full Tilt. Everything else takes a back seat to that.

DERB

i wonder if that guy knows he became a meme

The first big bet game I ever saw online was CCCPoker - I'd already been playing 10-20 limit on the usual US sites (Planet and Paradise) for a year or so but I found this 1-2 uncapped PL game on CCC. We all talk about "printing money" but this was as close to that as I've ever seen. Then moved to Stars after they spread NL and bigger limit games and then finally UB when they spread 25-50 games until the scandal hit. And around then of course the government came down and Netteller vanished and you couldn't use a US card or bank transfer any more. Everyone raves about Party in those days but I was still on dial up service at home and it was too buggy on Party for me. Guess I missed out on that.

I'm sure many of you have already caught this, but PokerGo has been uploading entire episodes of the WSOP ME telecasts to its YouTube channel during the last few weeks. For example, here is Episode 1 of the 2005 Main, best known for the "I can dodge bullets, baby" line:



What a walk down memory lane. I also appreciate that they edited out the whole NLHE tutorial that always swallowed up a couple of minutes early in the broadcast.

Wish I could somehow get my hands on "Beyond the Felt" documentary.
Free, of course, lol.

I'm sure most of the OGs have seen this, but there was a great poker documentary, about professional poker player Greg Lavery, created by Krantz 14 years ago, that is called From Busto to Robusto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK8O...nel=RobustoLLC

I just finished a re-watch of the 2006 Main Event on PokerGO. Guessing they'll dump that back on YouTube soon.

My thoughts:

- It's amazing how passive the meta was. The light 3-bet was not part of the general poker lexicon yet. The amount of people letting it go 4-5 ways on day 1-2 with hands like TT, AJ, KQ, and AQ is slightly tilting.

- It looks like the starting stack was still only 10k, meaning you either had to run really good right away or be gone swiftly. I would be curious to hear from old time participants if the structure was as bad in those years as it looks on TV. For a "world championship", it seems very fast.

- The early episodes are mediocre, but the middle-late portion is good, highlighted by what I'll call "The Eric Molina episode" (day 4) and "Prahlad/Lisandro Ante-gate" (day 5). There are some classic poker boom moments in there.

- Dmitri Nobles seems like a nice guy, but his play was Chuck Liddell levels of bad. Just a luckbox clicking buttons.

- On the topic of luckboxes, this year obviously belonged to Jamie Gold. For better or worse, an indelible figure in the poker boom because of this run. He caught an absurd number of cards, but also got people to make some very big mistakes against him. He gets a lot of hate in the poker community for his ego and for donking off his money subsequently (High Stakes Poker, etc). To me he's not quite as bad as everyone says, but more like a journeyman pitcher who threw one perfect game in his career. This was his year, and it almost felt like destiny how he steamrolled this whole thing.

- Based on the televised hands, the best players to run deep that year were Prahlad and Friberg. Prahlad is the only guy who played something that resembles 2023 poker, so I have to give him props for that. He was ahead of his time. His rap was pure cringe though.

- A lot of the narrative was built up on the inevitable Jamie Gold vs. Allen Cunningham amateur vs. top pro storyline. Cunningham had numerous monster scores in the 00s and then just kind of faded into obscurity in the 10s. He doesn't seem to grind tournaments much anymore. Not sure if he lost his passion for poker, if the games just got that much harder, or if it's a bit of both. One thing you realize watching these old shows is that poker has a short shelf life for most people. They engage with it for a few years and then move on to other things. Can't remember the last time I saw Binger or Wasicka in the chip counts.

This was the tournament structure for the Main Event in 2006:

Starting Stack: 10,000
Table size: 10 handed
Minutes per level: 100
Day 1 had 7 full levels and 20 minutes into level 8

Level/Ante/Small/Big
1 0 25 50
2 0 50 100
3 0 100 200
4 25 100 200
5 25 150 300
6 50 200 400
7 50 250 500
8 75 300 600
9 100 400 800
10 200 500 1,000
11 200 600 1,200
12 200 800 1,600
13 300 1,000 2,000
14 300 1,200 2,400
15 400 1,500 3,000
16 500 2,000 4,000
17 500 2,500 5,000
18 1,000 3,000 6,000
19 1,000 4,000 8,000
20 2,000 6,000 12,000
21 2,000 8,000 16,000
22 3,000 10,000 20,000
23 4,000 12,000 24,000
24 5,000 15,000 30,000
25 5,000 20,000 40,000
26 5,000 25,000 50,000
27 10,000 30,000 60,000
28 10,000 40,000 80,000
29 10,000 50,000 100,000
30 20,000 60,000 120,000
31 20,000 80,000 160,000
32 30,000 100,000 200,000
33 40,000 120,000 240,000
34 50,000 150,000 300,000
35 50,000 200,000 400,000
36 50,000 250,000 500,000
37 100,000 300,000 600,000
38 100,000 400,000 800,000
39 100,000 500,000 1,000,000
40 200,000 600,000 1,200,000
41 200,000 600,000 1,200,000

Thank you for that.

10k starting chips. BB is 100 by level 2.

So you could pretty realistically be playing pots for several thousand chips within the first few hours. Lose a couple big hands and you're cooked.

That partially explains why it was so cagey. There was less wiggle room.

The flipside is that the bad players back then were much worse than the bad players of today, so there were more spots to just print easy chips.

Jamie and Yang were both donks who went for it instead of sitting back and hoping for cards. They were both clowns but played super aggro at the end of the main when most players were crapping themselves.

i usually watch this at least once a year. so many faces young and old, and a bunch of dorky references to NVG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G0WXRGYlz0&t=15s

Today, 2/3rds of the Main Event field makes it through Day 1. In 2006, they played until 3am and it was closer to 1/3rd made it through Day 1.

from my understanding prahlad was one of the original end bosses online so it makes sense how far ahead of the curve he was