Champagne Parties and Caviar Dreams

I was reading a thread on 2p2 the other day titled, “What were the 2+2 forums like in the beginning?” I actually avoided the thread for a while because it was in NVG and I assumed it would just be full of dumb jokes and bad information (“NVG: Not Very Good”) but when the thread had grown I decided to check it out and it actually had some interesting stories from longtime posters that took me back to what poker and the forums were like in the early and mid 2000s.

Then there was a post from a newer poster who asked, “All you posters with early registration dates who aren’t poker millionaires: what happened?”

I registered on 2p2 in December 2004. To put that in perspective, that’s before durrrr registered there. And yet I am not a poker millionaire. So what happened?

A lot of players romanticize the early-to-mid-2000s to an almost mythical degree. They think, “man, if I could just go back to those early Party days, pre-UIGEA, I would grind 28 hours a day and stack more cheddar than a Kraft employee with OCD! I’d be a millionaire!” Maybe so. But I have met more than my share of poker millionaires, and I’d like to share my thoughts about what it seems to take to become one. Even if you started back in the good old days.

In addition to Jay and Emil, I’ve met a lot of other really successful online players over the years. Longtime high stakes players and posters on 2p2 seem to form a pretty tight-knit community. I think it’s because they are all veterans of a very specialized and unique set of experiences and opportunities and that, in a way, bonds them together. Kinda like the soldiers in Band of Brothers, except instead of reminiscing about fighting the Germans at Bastogne, they share recommendations for high-end sushi places in San Fransisco.

Anyways, my point is, when it comes to observing poker millionaires, I think I have a pretty reasonable sample size. They are a diverse group, but they all seem to have two things in common. Here is what it appears to take to join their ranks:

1. They’re smart. Like really, really smart. Have you ever been to a party and started talking to someone and then, while they’re saying something remarkably insightful on a dense or complicated topic, think to yourself, “Damn, this is a smart dude!”? Well, when THAT guy goes to a party and talks to Phil Galfond or Ariel Schneller, THAT guy says, “Damn! these are some really smart fucking dudes!”

2. They’ve worked incredibly hard. The next time you read a “well” post from a sucessful online pro, read it closely. I guarantee that when they describe how they rose through the ranks they will talk about an extended period of time when they were “obsessed” with poker. Every single well post I’ve read mentions a fanatical period early in their career where they had to learn everything they could about the game. They’ll describe how they voraciouslty read forums, endlessly talked about hands and line options and opponents and situations with other similarly obsessed players, and ground out thousands and thousands and thousands of hands.

Back when Emil and I used to play at a weekly dormroom game in college, Emil would play a hand, then leap from his chair to play a few hands online at his desk, then run back to the table when the action returned to him. I remember going to his room to try and drag him out to some party sophomore year only to find him somehow 14-tabling on two 17" monitors back in early 2004. Back before I knew him that well, even though there were a lot of guys that played in our dorm game, Emil was the only one who was, “the poker guy”, and while I was out flunking music theory, he and flawless_victory and Prevaricator and AZK and two dozen others were figuring out who to three-bet against, when, and why, and it was only after they had worked their games inside and out that they started making graphs with tall green lines that snaked to the top right of the screen on shiny, poker-bought 30" monitors.

So even back then, even in the good old days when a table with an average VPIP of 35% was a bad table, nobody who was just “pretty good”, or “decent”, or “solid” ended up becoming a millionaire. It still took a smart, talented person who worked their ass off. Sorry guys, in the end, poker’s just like everything else.

So does that mean the “good old days” really weren’t as great as people say? HELL no. It really was amazing, a true gold rush. With a minimum of awareness and the mere outline of a thought process (i.e., the way I play poker), you could have a three figure hourly and earn thousands and thousands of dollars.

But not millions.

Millions took a little bit more.