The Midnight Madness tournament at Sahara 2005.




The ghost of Eskmo Clark still might haunt this area of the old Caesars Poker Room.

Hollywood Poker and 2 months 2 million might be my favorite nostalgia.

Bill FillMaff winning an allin w AJcc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKqg6MhLJGI


Also, while grinding up the stakes, looking up to Ha££ing0L (or however it was he spelled it) and xxTHEJOKERxx (or something like that) crushing the highest games stars had to offer, 10/20. Was so fun watching them abusing the allin rebuy bug and sitting with like 80-100k stacks at 10/20

I can remember playing a Binions tournament a few times totally **** faced that was maybe 100 for the entry where they'd get 200 runners.


It was a midnight tournament.

I remember around 2005-06 they had 1am tournament that would still get 5 or so tables. It would end when the sun started to come up. Then you’d stumble into your 29 dollar room the size of a shoebox. You could stay in a room that had two beds and it was so damn small you could roll out of one bed and almost fall into the other.

Eating a Deep Fried Oreo at Mermaids to soak in the day full of beats.

Forget midnight or 1 a.m., some copy editor had to be on a 48-hour work bender to authorize the apostrophe in the word "Oreos" on that poster.

Nah, people are apostrophe crazy.

At my work, it seems like 80% of the people use it to pluralize names of things.

Haha I stayed at Binions for one night in September on a drunken downtown trip. The hotel was closed for like 10 years and reopened maybe a year or two ago. Still a shoebox.

One night was perfect for the nostalgia factor. 2 nights would have been horrendous.


Poor Twinkies sign doesn't get an apostrophe or the Twinkies logo. The Oreo sign is just showing off.

I miss that thing where a bunch of us grinded up play money over and over on Stars so our families couldn't bitch at us for gambling. And then we would sell it to one of many play money hustlers only to get wrecked at real money nanostakes. Rinse, repeat for however long it takes to stop sucking. Then realize that nanostakes rake is astronomical and therefore nanostakes isn't really any harder than small stakes which isn't really any harder than mid stakes which isn't really any harder than high stakes. Good times.

what wtf, you could sell play chips?

from what i've heard there was an actual market for this for many years. i imagine you sold 100 million chips for like $5. perhaps a play chip grinder of yesteryear could specify a bit more accurately. pretty sick risk-free grind if you live in a country where nothing costs anything...

So a guy would make a Pokerstars account and deposit a bunch of real money. He would then put up a website offering to buy play money chips in bulk. I remember being able to buy $10 worth of chips after grinding play money for a couple weeks each time.

Anyway, then you would message him and he would tell you to transfer the play money chips to him. He would then send $10 or whatever. Then you would bust your roll in 2-3 hours. He got lots of repeat business!

This was one area where Stars wasn't very forward-thinking. This market existed for years and was lucrative because Stars simply refused to sell play money.

It became an even bigger burden because the play chip farmers would create bots to get the 3 per hour free play chip refills, then dump the chips to their main account to have inventory to sell, so Stars had to devote resources to freaking investigate play money duplicate account abuse, play money chip dumping, and play money chip sale scams, to say nothing of the play money races, play money table chat abuse, and others.

What a time it was.

Lmao. Some of my friends who haven’t touched poker since 2010 will still bring up Bill Fillmaff from time to time. Legend

yes but not on stars itself but on some websites you could.
I think you got $1 per 100.000 playchips (edit: in fact i checked and this is true, it was quite easy to make a buck this way)

I do remember that given you could sell your play chips, the stakes i was playing in the highest play chips cash games was actually higher than the the lower real money cash games

Its how i started and funded by br and it was so cool that you could make something out of absolutely nothing... this was 17/18 years ago for me, god i miss those fun days

most annoying person in poker imo

i thought the puppy feet thing was just one clip, turns out he has hours and hours of himself screaming narration like that

can't understand why anyone would ever watch

and man, that's wild that people were buying play money chips instead of just grinding the micros with that real money

lol I don't even remember puppy feet. We were moreso fans of his live action vids. I think being a dumb kids helped with the enjoyment. Lots of internet humor back then was ****ing awful but that's kinda what made it great.

wow, thanks slugant, feels like i missed out on an angle for my no deposit challenge on stars

I used to frequent the play money scene on full tilt/stars back in the day post-black friday. it was a lot of fun running it up before people could buy play chips cause people actually tried once you got up to high enough "stakes". and they had a play money balance leaderboard on their blog

Real ballers were battling a legion of 10k people for one of the 27 payouts in the Hubble Hold 'Em freeroll.

I can't say I ever got particularly close.

If I remember correctly, it would fill up almost immediately after reg opened, so you had to be quick on the trigger just to play.

Some people preferred play money high stakes over real money nano stakes. On Stars you could reload to 1000 (?) chips every time you busted. Obviously not nearly enough to play those high stakes games so people had to buy chips.

i remember this and how upset i got when i missed it and it filled up before i clicked it - would sometimes standby ready to take a slot if someone unregged and would sometimes get in that way

wouldn't matter that i'd be playing like 15 tables for actual money, i'd still reg every single freeroll and just put it in a different color scheme so if i had too many tables running would just do a fold/shove only strat to minimize time

remember when they switched from cash to tickets for the weekly freeroll, i had about 80 of those tickets in my balance and then when they wiped the astronomers freeroll series entirely they took them all away, i asked for compensation and they justifiably told in the most politest customer service speak possible to go ead

even when i wasn't playing for real money - would just have it on and play in the background while watching a movie or even doing work - literally played freerolls at work - only freerolls because would often miss entire orbits - but i got really good at being able to look at the table, make the quick decision and then go back to my spreadsheet or whatever i was working on - was never an issue but then again i was never really closely supervised

never deposited at any sites - so the freeroll grind was real - low key upset i didn't know about the play money exploit, would have worked that system hard for sure

I've been rewatching the 2004-2007 WSOP MAIN on Poker Go, it's amazing how out of control people are.

It's just 2-3 people at every table playing like an SNL character, screaming and yelling, berating people, doing literal victory laps. Call a guy's turn shove and you're ahead "I GOT HIM! I GOT HIM!!!!!!!!! I KNEW IT!!!!!!! YOU'RE DONE!!!!!!"

"Keep raising me, keep raising me... You'll find out who the boss is, I'm THE BOSS!!!! WE DON'T BACK DOOOOOOOOWN!" and the guy goes to the randos in the crowd and high fives.

Havad Kahn, it's all a distaster
I guess it was fun when I was young, but watching back it's all so cringe