OMG - Funny story about Isaac Haxton!!! I met him when he was probably 14 at many Magic tournaments (He grew up in the Syracuse area and I grew up 30 minutes away)!!! He was just getting started and eventually made the Pro Tour multiple times. I know most of the major tournament players all got into Poker - I remember being at Origins in Columbus,Ohio when the Nationals were still held there (1996-9 I think were the years I went) . There were Magic people playing poker everywhere!! This is well before David Williams' well documented run at the WSOP in 2004.
I didn't have much $$ in 2006, but I did very well in Tournaments. Ten years ago this month, I finished 2nd and 3rd in two $3 Re-buys with over 2000 people each - I made about $5k in the span of a week. That was pretty awesome back then.
If Bitcoin had existed back then, it would've been very different, I agree!!
I've played some free Poker here and there - like Zynga and stuff, but I've been busy with my YouTube channel in which I play a ton of games on my Phone, and it's pretty time consuming. However, it's worth it because I now have over 93,000 subscribers, and I make a nice bit of change on that every month hahah!!
Great to see you here and ROCK ON DUDE!!
-bigedude
Yes, Ike originally tried to play chess competitively, but it wasnt for him. Then he switched over to Magic, and the following leap to poker was much more fluid. The two biggest feeder games into poker are MTG and Starcraft.
The small rebuys were a lot of fun back then. I was always a cash game player so I never had the big rushes of going deep in them early in my career, but I had friends who built their bankrolls on tournaments like the ones you final tabled.
Do you ever twitch? It seems like the subscriber system on twitch can be incredibly profitable. Or did you find for your specific content that youtube was more profitable?