If you’ve been into poker for more than 15 years, there’s a good chance you’ve played it online. You might even be playing it right now, depending on your multitasking capabilities.
Or, depending on where you live.
Up until 2011, getting online for a few hands was as easy as your internet connection allowed. Nowadays, as we know too well, there are plenty of places where finding a fully regulated site to play on is a lot harder than it was.
From Texas to Omaha and Mississippi, even the birthplaces of some of poker’s most legendary games are off limits to online grinders. Assuming, that is, they wish to stay on the right side of the regulatory lines.
Black Friday in 2011 marked a new chapter in the biography of online poker, and the start of a new era. But it came barely halfway through the 25+ year story of the online game. Do you know what happened before then, and how the modern game has adjusted to that moment’s far-reaching effects?
A new book from a former high-stakes poker pro, Wladimir Taschner, seeks to tell the story in full. The History of Online Poker: The Players, the Money, and the Making of a Billion Dollar Game goes back to the very origins of the phenomenon, and makes for fascinating reading.
Back to the 'before times'
Taschner’s reach back through history extends beyond the birth of online poker to the culture that bore it. Email games, Usenet groups, and the World Rec.Gambling Poker Tournament (WRGPT) — a correspondence tournament that still runs to this day — were the forerunners to what was to come. And it came quickly.
From those days in the late 20th century, through the rise of the first sites such as Planet Poker and Paradise Poker, and on to the launches of brands still around today like PokerStars and partypoker, Taschner lays out the ‘pre-boom’ landscape before us.
Of course, the Chris Moneymaker-inspired poker boom that occurred in the early 2000s is likely well-known to most readers, but the book helps brings some of those key hands from the 2003 WSOP Main Event to life.
From eliminating Phil Ivey on the final table bubble to defeating Sammy Farha heads-up, the poker boom’s ground zero moment is well reconstructed.
From there, we travel through time as poker explodes on TV, online and in the wider culture. Coverage of the careers of successful online legends such as Chris Moorman, Ilari Sahamies, Tom Dwan and more help illustrate the path from the micros to stardom.
A comprehensive history
The book explores the culture of forums, backers, stables, cash games, tournaments, HUDS, and all the poker-lore that arose from the past quarter century of online poker.
Figures who have carved their own niche in the poker world are tracked from small ponds to oceans, as technology, strategy, meta-games and regulations continue to evolve. Stories we half-remember, those we’ve forgotten completely and those we never knew are recounted, illustrating a time that seems simultaneously like the recent past and a lifetime ago.
The economics of life as a professional are examined, as are those of life as an operator, while Black Friday, the collapse of Full Tilt Poker and the still-running fallout get the time and space they need.
And from there, things keep evolving. That’s life, and that’s poker.
From the pre-Intenet age to the solver era, little is left out in this comprehensive study. The author, Wladimir Taschner, is a former heads-up specialist who produced content for the likes of PokerStrategy.com and DeucesCracked.com. He clearly knows this story from a firsthand perspective, but has backed it up with sound research.
If you’re too young to remember the birth of online poker, this book will fill in some interesting blanks and is recommended reading.
But this recommendation comes with a warning: if you are old enough to remember those first days of online play, this book may make you feel older.
The History of Online Poker: The Players, the Money, and the Making of a Billion Dollar Game by Wladimir Taschner is available now at Amazon.
