Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading stories from others about their experiences in the early days of the poker industry, working with some of the characters of the time. Dan Goldman, for example, recounts how he was hired to head up marketing at PokerStars (and tells many other great stories). Then we have Steve Badger’s ‘Stories from the Poker Boom’. For a poker geek like me who remembers a little of the good old days, these stories are gold.
I’ve now been in this industry long enough that I have some ‘old timer’ stories of my own, many of which from my time working with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker between 2006 and 2011. I’m one of a handful of people to have worked for both Ray Bitar (Full Tilt Poker’s CEO) and Isai Scheinberg (Founder of PokerStars). In this article I thought it would be interesting to talk about my experiences with them, what similarities they had, and what made them different.
My First Encounters with Isai and Ray
I’d been working for PokerStars for a year and a half before I met Isai for the first time…