Paradise Poker/Party Poker circa 2000

[Charlie Frank]

I started playing online in early 2000 when Paradise was undisputably the number 1 site. They used to have around 3-4000 people at peak periods.

I played on both PartyPoker and PokerStars when they were still in Beta testing. PokerStars had some great freerolls running - the first freeroll I played I won it and got $50.

PartyPoker had some problems early on with their random seed generator. I was watching a friend of mine play once in a PPM qualifier (late 2000 I think) and the identical hand was dealt two hands in a row (same hole cards for EVERYONE, same flop, turn and river). They called my friend and asked him to keep quiet about it, and offered him some free stuff. My friend posted the hand histories on RGP back in 2000.

Somehow they recovered from that and now they have just gone crazy with numbers - I saw 58,000 on Party the other day. And its still going up.

Paradise must be kicking themselves for letting Party take over - although Paradise has gone up in numbers as well (8500 the other day).

CF