So this will ring a bell for Americans in large part, especially those who became part of the Texas Hold’em “phenomenon” when the game blew up like I’ve never seen before. I was in college and remember @MoFough83 teaching me how to play, and falling in love. We had games going somewhere every single night. ESPN started broadcasting poker tournaments regularly for the first time it was so massive.
This I believe is what helped pave way to online casinos in big big way. They boom, the US banned online gambling and it rocked the whole boat.
Im just curious if anyone else remembers this time period as well and as fondly as I do. Also curious if this is what started you in online gambling like it did me.
I never lived in the USA and was never interested in poker and I learned about the big poker boom from books. But the description of this bubble really interested me. There is such a wonderful book - “Signal and Noise”. This book was written by forecaster Nate Silver. One of the chapters of his book is called “The Poker Bubble”. There he writes that the poker boom began in the United States in 2003. Back then, even a little skill in playing poker could provide a player with a profit, because the number of new inexperienced players grew almost exponentially. Perhaps the impetus for the formation of the bubble was an interesting fact: for the first time, the World Series of Poker was won by a 27-year-old amateur, an accountant from Nashville, Chris Moneymaker. He managed to turn $39 into $2.5 million. But in general, the nature of such phenomena always remains unclear. Like the “tulip fever” in Holland several centuries ago, so is the poker bubble in 2003.
