Nolan is a very entertaining and engaging writer, so it's always fun to read his stuff.
He's writing a long series of articles about early online poker.
Just go to this cover page: http://www.nolandalla.com/20-years-o...d-broken-mice/
He will keep updating it as he writes more articles.
Right now, he's written 4 parts, covering through 2006.
These are very long, so settle in. Really interesting, though.
There are a few omissions and factual mistakes, though (which is understandable, since it's been so long):
- Party Poker started in August 2001, not 2002. I actually heard of it for the first time when I was in Vegas in August 2001, when I spent a weekend with a girl I had gotten to know through another site (True Poker). She told me about it, and asked if I had heard of it.
- The man he met at Party was Vikrant Bhargava, not Anurag Dikshit. Vikrant was the marketing guy, and directly interfaced with players and others who were interested in promoting Party. Anurag wasn't known to the public until years later. Vikrant sometimes called me and asked for my opinion of the site.
(The above two points, which I meant to raise earlier to Nolan, were also made by Mike O'Malley, who worked with Party from the start.)
- The reason for Planet Poker's demise was a bad software update they pushed in mid-2001, which made it impossible to connect to the server. Most people simply assumed it was down for good, and gave up. The only fix was to uninstall the new software and reinstall it from the website, and this only worked days after the failed update (so people trying this at the time it occurred also couldn't get in!) The site immediately became a ghost town after this.
- Paradise Poker's demise was due to idiotic complacency. They were the clear market leader in 2001, followed by True Poker (a site Nolan doesn't mention). However, Paradise's software was buggy and had issues on certain computers (especially older ones), and they invested zero money in marketing or expansion. Party, on the other hand, was very aggressive with marketing, and was the first to offer an affiliate program (hence the birth of rakeback). They quickly lost market share to Party in 2002, which rapidly overtook them as #1. They still didn't market much or offer meaningful promotions. Then Pokerstars came along later in 2002, and really started to gain steam in 2003. They were offering MTTs, and also had the best software by far. Paradise became a ghost town. Cautionary tale about sitting on your hands and doing nothing when you're sitting at the top, and other hungry competitors are knocking at your door.
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