Indeed but that doesn't mean the best solver users would be the best players back then. Obviously they would still be very good but using solvers and figuring out games are 2 totally different skill sets.

If you invented a new poker game tomorrow someone like Shaun Deeb would be way better at it in 3 months than solver wizards.

he’s autistic

Tough to say because we don't ultimately know how good (or bad) Poker Bunny is, but yeah, she might have done well in that era. "Widespread" is also tough to pin down, too – I'm inferring that you mean widespread within the poker fandom, but not necessarily beyond that.

Gotta remember, in that era, there were plenty of women who managed to bank on their appearance, often with only secondary consideration for how good they were as players. So we're talking people like Lacey Jones, Jennicide Leigh, Erica Schoenberg, Evelyn Ng, Christina Lindley, Vanessa Rousso, Lauren Kling. They got endorsements and publicity in ways that others would not have (note that this dynamic is not unique to poker). I'm sure I'm missing a few obvious people, but that come to mind offhand.

I exclude Jennifer Tilly and Fatima Moreira de Melo from the above group because they had already earned a level of fame prior to poker due to their film and sports careers, respectively. (Fatima will always serve as an outlier in this stuff because her massive personality.) Tiffany Michelle received inordinate attention during her Main Event run, even before we saw her interactions on the ESPN telecasts, but she also had an existing presence in the poker media.

Anyway, we'll never know. In a different era, she could have been someone only known by those who frequented Wicked Chops, or she might have been someone who earned invites to the NBC Heads-Up and Poker After Dark, and received sponsorship deals much to the chagrin (or delight) of NVGers.

Personally, I doubt it. I don't watch HCL as often as others, but from what I've seen, she has a strange vibe that might be too off-putting for mass appeal. She is effectively poker's answer to Poppy circa 2019.

I don't know about the specific persons mentioned here but I agree with the principle.

I don't think there were very many highly analytical types among the more successful boom era players. Without tools like solvers poker didn't really lend itself to deep detailed analysis and memorization, imo.

I played during the boom era and I don't really remember anyone like the expert NLHE players who coach professionally (many of whom you can find on 2+2). They're kind of a different class of people that wouldn't be particularly drawn to poker if the tools were not available to rigorously analyze it.

I think that's what makes Doug Polk so impressive. (Or maybe Jungleman and some others were doing the same thing, idk.) He took the concepts of game theory that were known in the abstract by some of us and made a serious effort to apply to his actual HU play. Whereas a lot of us knew about the game theory side but were not able to translate it into strategy. We understood exploitability and the potential EV of a GTO strategy, we just didn't know how to take the next step.

Agree

Lots of other answers make no sense

Lederer and Ferguson were definitely pushed as the mathematical/analytical types. I doubt they were in the lab with solvers, but I know Ferguson had the background in game theory. Their brand at the time (pre-Full Tilt scandal) was being the cautious, mathematical, analytical players on the circuit. Whether or not that was the reality is unknown to me. They were definitely marketed and sold that way though.

To answer the OP, it's anyone who:

A.) Binks a couple high-profile tourneys.
B.) Has a marketable personality.

There are lots of marketable archetypes: the fun player (Negreanu, Scotty), the monster (Ivey, Hansen), the degen (Ungar, Flack), the whiz kid (Isildur, durrrr), the everyman (Moneymaker), the villain (Hellmuth, Devilfish). You can imagine some contemporary parallels who loosely fit these parameters. To be blunt, a lot of it is simply the packaging. There are lots of amazing NLHE players who have no public brand because they haven't been sold the same way. The WPT and WSOP circa 2003-2005 put a spotlight on those old school guys in a way that we haven't seen since. It's not that they were more interesting, but rather that they were packaged more effectively and to a much wider audience.

1)it wouldn't matter how good or bad she is for the most part
2) none of these women were HUGE besides Rousa and to much lesser degree Ng

Pman with his dynamic personality and dedication to the game would have flourished in the day. Him and Negreanu would have been really close friends no doubt.

JRB - wasn't he around for the boom or too busy on Survivor?

+1
I think a lot of us who were successful back in those days intuitively knew a lot of the analytical side on some level, even though there weren't words for a lot of it. ICM? Every successful SNG and MTT player knew what it was and played in a way to maximize it even if it had no name. Ranges? Sure, we had some pretty good ideas what people were playing and acted accordingly and I am not talking about "putting someone on a specific hand." Solvers have refined all this stuff for sure. Also, depending on the particular game you are in, GTO can totally mess you up. LOL. All this intuitive stuff was hard to teach back then because many players couldn't really describe a lot of it and there was a lot of "feel" play, especially live. White magic, if you will. I think this still is huge live including high rollers when I have watched them. I haven't really played online since Black Friday and, gotta admit, am afraid to.

Guess it depends on your definition of the boom. Think I first saw JRB on a WSOP episode around 2009. I was counting the boom years as 03-07, the absolute peak of poker mania.

Agree that none were "huge," certainly not in the Negreanu/Ivey/Hellmuth sense. But all of them traded on the NIL in ways not at all commensurate with their results, which was my point.

I believe he was playing during the boom. While he oblitereated Hellmuth, his other recent appearances that I saw he was a fish (maybe a whale). If he tried to be HUGE during the boom, he would no longer own all those casinos. He would be broke.

Humans are visual, so yes. She would have widespread appeal.

Couple easy ones.

Fedor / Addamo = Gus Hansen types.

Shaun deeb = Negreanu.

Mike Mcdonald possibly

Bonomo could very easily be sold as a villain to the red blooded Americans.

Some other off the wall types who could be sold to the public - Farid Jattin comes to mind

Davidi Kitai / Mercier is a no ****in brainer with some of the sickest reads of all time. These two might not count tho as both we sponsored for a long time

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Dan Smith could be in the buzz and maybe nominated (but most likely won't win) for the Nobel Peace Prize. His philantrophy platform would be 100 times bigger during the boom.

Jungleman would be much bigger than Hellmuth and Negreanu. His cringe showmanship would make him a mainstream celebrity. Poker Bunny wouldn't be as big as Annie Duke and Jennifer Harman, but bigger than any other female player.

Shaun Deeb could be a great villain depending on how he is spun. If Arieh can be a villain in 2004 and Sheikhan was also a villain, the much more articulate Deeb would easily surpass both. Vogelsang could be a villain too, for an obvious ----------------------reason.

No, all of these guys were way more interesting

You could have an unlimited marketing budget with smartest people and they probably wouldn't be able to figure how to make players like Addamo, Peters, Aldemir, and a whole slew of other guys interesting

Being interesting and interested in spending all day in a solver usually don't go hand in hand

I am enjoying this thread. Here is a guy I follow a bit because I watch European poker: Ramón Colillas. He is very obviously a good player live, but holy crap, he is super boring, although I like to watch him play. He has loosened up a bit since he gained success and I don't really follow online, so don't know how he is there. I wonder how he would have turned out as a star back in the day? He couldn't have been like he is now and be a star simply because it takes an extroverted personality to do that. Also, for the most part, all those old time boom stars got their notoriety from live play coverage, not online except as an aside. The boom created a new generation of online mainly players who had and are having great success. But virtually all the stars were known from live. We have no mainstream live coverage anymore. It is all niche coverage. Widespread stars are not usually born on Twitch or Poker Go. It is just a sign of the times and I am sure Black Friday played a huge role. I literally stepped away from poker for almost ten years on Black Friday. And, despite poker being an international game, those boom stars were mostly made in America, including when they weren't Americans, although most were. Now we have sites like Poker Stars promoting people like GJ Reggie and Spraggy. I am never watching people play online at any stake. Maybe the European crowd likes them, but I wonder.

He was broke through the boom years you identify if memory serves.

JRB came on the scene in 2005 in a televised 10K circuit event that Doug Lee won

Got famous for wearing his beanie cap and saying “good laydown” when it wasn’t

Back in 2008 I was at wsop playing a cash game next to final table of 1500 limit holdem shootout

JRB was there and for some reason wasn’t too enthusiastic in playing it. Greg mueller was hanging around and always getting in his face, presumably because he was his backer?

Think he said something like “shut up and play, you are only famous because you wore a silly hat on tv once”

Scott Seiver

username checks out!

Love jungle, and think he'd do great (if he had a v.good PR team)

Interesting, thethethe... DOES Cates have some sort of PR team?

Early on, Jungle made an uncomfortable presence on TV, with that NBC Heads-Up clip with Phil Ivey being one of the more meme-able moments. I also recall some interactions with Scott Seiver and (I think) Hellmuth that only added to this image. Then it seems like someone flipped a switch, and he became one of the game's most outgoing and colorful characters.

I can almost tell how long various people in this thread have been around poker by their descriptions of Jungle on a different spectrum: awkward vs. charismatic. If you could go back to NVG in the early 2010s, no one would believe the word "charismatic" will one day be thrown in conjunction with his name. And those who only know him from the post-Instagram era and WWE get-up may not realize that the 2013 version of Jungleman seemed like the love child of Tina Belcher and Chris Griffin.

Might be one of the more dramatic transformations I've seen since George Foreman. Yes, my generation first knew Big George as a smiling teddy bear pitching non-stick grills, so much so that many of my cohort can't believe their eyes when they see the big-brute early-70s George that took on Norton, Frazier and Ali. (FWIW, it's quite possible that his "PR advisors" were the higher-ups in the church – Foreman's God-lovin' ways seemed to come out at the same time as the affable side.)