– How easy would it be to become a crusher if you time-traveled back to 2000 with a $10K bankroll?
This is the question one Reddit user asked.
🔶 Let’s say the challenge is to make $5 million playing poker (net from poker tables, does not include taxes, life expenses, etc.) in the 2000’s, starting from a $10K roll. What current skill level would be required for someone to be favored to pull this off?
Has the game advanced so much to the point that you're a break-even live player could just print and move up to the high stakes quickly and become a crusher if they time-traveled back to 2000? Or would it be a little harder?
I legitimately feel like anyone who can win at live poker in 2025 would have at least a chance of making it big if they got to go back in time, but maybe games were more advanced back then than I’m giving them credit for.
Edit- seeing the early responses are talking about how soft the games are- are we saying it was easy to the point where a breakeven 2025 rec could make it onto HSP if they time-traveled back to 2000 and grinded up into the nosebleeds?
🔸 I’m not a good poker player, and I was awesome in the early 2000s
— Yep, I paid for some cool shit in college with my PartyPoker winnings back then and I am not what I'd consider a good player, I was just aggressive.
— A current 2/5 winner is miles ahead of the 25/50 pros back then. Just the knowledge framework and basic concepts of todays game that even top pros weren't aware of back then. I'm not even talking advanced GTO stuff. Pros back then often didn't even think in terms of "ranges" or "balance".
— I was paying all my bills on .50/$1 limit. If I wasn’t a moron and learned NL or had any sense of bankroll management I would have been able to buy a damn house.
🔸Legendary online grinder and 2+2 moderator ZBTHorton wrote:
I was a professional poker player from like 2005-2015 or so. I played pretty high stakes MTT's and mid stakes NL cash games.
If you sent me in 2015 back to 2000, I would absolutely crush souls. It's impossible to know exactly how it would go with only 10K, but if you gave me 50K, I can almost guarantee I would have won a shit load of money until the games began getting harder post UIGEA.
The games in the 2000's were absolutely nothing like now. It's almost an entirely different game.
🔸 If we are talking strictly live poker, I think the answer is highly dependent on where you are playing 2/5 live now. I don’t consider myself a much better player now than I was pre Black Friday and I was beating the 6max deep stack tables for a decent amount at 1/2 on Full Tilt. Nowhere near a crusher and my sample size falls short of anything definitive, but I did “grind” up from .10/.25 to 1/2, if you can even call it grinding bc I did it as a side hustle while working full time so I played primarily during prime weekend and evening hours.
I’ll play live when I can and I’ve never played higher than 2/5, mainly bc I don’t live anywhere close to bigger casino games than 2/5, with 1/3 being the standard unless it’s Friday or Saturday night.
The live games don’t feel incredibly different to me where I play. I do think if I took 10k back to internet poker in the post Moneymaker boom online scene I would have made significantly more and progressed past 1/2 into the mid stakes online games rather quickly, simply because people were bad back then and everyone played online. Casino play was a total waste of time when drunk college kids could just reload with their parent’s credit card whenever they got home from the bars. It really was incredible and I wish I would have taken the game much more seriously back then.
Maybe I’m wrong about live scene in those days and games in places like Vegas or LA etc had super soft NL cash games running regularly at 5/10+, but honestly I can’t say bc I didn’t live anywhere near those games. Nor did I care bc I could 4 table the 6max deep games on FT and I would table change if there weren’t at least two 40/10 type players or worse on my table.
I guess all I’m saying is that online is where all the fish were playing back then. Maybe they were in the casinos too, but why play 20-30 hands per hour live at a 10 handed table when you could easily multi table however many tables you were capable of online against super soft opponents? Casino play just didn’t make sense for the majority of winning players after the online floodgates opened.
Oh, and in 2000, you’d have been flinging poo at the limit holdem tables in most casinos anyway.
🔸 This is about the real of it.
I played professionally during the heyday (totally illegally I will admit as I was underage) and was basically the end boss of all the local games.
UIGEA came around and I wasn’t near any real casinos, also wasn’t 21 quite yet so it didn’t make sense for me to really try it out with a fake. So I kept playing in the local games as a side hustle until most got rounded up.
Now I just go and play live on occasion when I’m feeling froggy.
Anyone halfway disciplined, with an appropriate bankroll could beat mid stakes NL games for a very good rate back then. Anyone that can break even or beat a mid stakes NL game now, would be printing wholesale in the early 2000s.
🔸 It’s just a numbers game. There are like 1-2 fish now. 4-5 regs. And 2-3 good players. This is per table.
Back then: 4-5 clueless new players or drunks. 1-2 OMC. 2 regs. 1 crusher.
And just about every category of player today is better than back then. Over the last 50 hours or cash online I’ve seen 2, maybe 3 fish that resemble the terrible players around the boom. I mean like god awful. Just punting off entire stacks then buying right back in and doing it again you saw that a lot back then. Or just some random that would sit down and lose his stack in an orbit then leave. The good old days.
🔸 I played LHE live for a living 2002-2010ish. Mostly 60/120. Was living on easy street. Thought it would never end. Housing crash ended the good times…
🔸 I would just buy 10k of Bitcoin
— You’d have to wait 20 years.
Can just crush it, make 5mil. Invest 3m in Bitcoin.
Dump 200k/y.
Still have 100 million in 2025.
🔸 It would be extremely easy. Just watch high-level poker from like 2005 lol, even the best players were bad by modern standards. If you can emotionally handle playing for the big money, any winning 2/5 player in 2025 would annihilate the game in 2000.
— I remember an episode of High Stakes Poker from that era and Jennifer Harmon, Eli Elezra and Phil Ivey were discussing the pot odds of the previous hand. I don’t think they were involved. And the three of them were all wrong. The way they were trying to break it down was funny.
🔸 5 million is a still a LOT of money to win.
The average live players I know who are anywhere between slight losers to 5bb/hr or so live winners who claim they “crushed it” back then all claim they where making low six figures at 2/5 and some 5/10.
Obviously the people who are really good today and also happened to be really good back then could and did make a lot more, and most of the super crushers also got those massive bankrolls that allowed them to play absolute nose bleeds from sponsorship money.
2months2million followed 4 top full time pros playing nose bleed stakes often heads up vs whales, so the best spots they could put themselves in, and won something like 150k each of you divided the total amount between the 4 of them over the 2 months. And they where playing non stop in the softest games they could possibly find.
This was mostly carried by one player who won 400k, the other 3 won 161k, 100k, and 7k, they are all still professional poker players today except maybe one I think.
Your average 1/2 or 2/5 NL break even or winning player today is almost certainly not as good as any of those guys, or as dedicated if you just picked form a random sampling.
There’s also the huge issue of variance, I’d you arrogant start in 5/10 or 10/20 you could just be brine in 5-10 bad beats. It’s also going to take longer being disciplined and starting somewhere with 50-100 buy ins at least and moving down during downswings etc.
Obviously the games were softer, but, I also know a lot of people who played poker and made money then and considered themselves crushers but fell off after the boom and are certainly not crushers today, even if they still win.
I think Doug Polk who was playing then, and is one of the best no limit players in the world said it took him 4+ years to make his first million. Even during the height of it all.
So realistically, you probably wouldn’t go back and just smash the games for 5mm in a year. Unless you are very very very high skilled now, and ran very hot.
🔸 I used to play 21 to 24 tables at once back then, when I was newer to poker. These days, I can barely do 4. That was how easy the decisions were back then. Today, people can and do put you in harder spots.
— Me too, I probably have some of the old hand histories in a folder somewhere. I should take a look at them. I also played up to 30 tables. Now I play 3-4, but earn just as much. Back then I should have cut my tables and played much higher.
🔸 One thing I think is overlooked were the bonuses. Sign-up bonuses. Redeposit bonuses. Sign up a friend bonuses. There were so many lesser-known poker websites that all had bonuses. 888poker, HollywoodPoker, Bodog, TigerGaming, TitanPoker, PKR- 3D poker. I’m sure I’m missing a lot. But these companies had sign-up bonuses and they were way easier to clear than any kind of bonus is today.
