Bankroll Busters: Look Who Started with Less Than $100

It’s the closest thing to a universal card-player’s dream: to stumble across some online poker site and try it out with just a few bucks and a matched deposit bonus code. Six months later those few dollars have gone and bred themselves up into a mountain of gold built of live tournament wins, TV contracts, and sponsorship deals.

For most of us, the reality is a far less glamorous mix of reloads, swings, and Red Queen style break even play, with your index finger tapping away as fast as it can on far too many table just for a break-even green line on PT3, plus a little rakeback.

But we dream the dream because, for some people, it all happens just like the fairy tale. Plenty of luckboxes have run up their initial deposits in crazy hot streaks, others have simply ground it out hand by hand with one eye on their Kelly criteria and the other on an equity calculator. And every now and then, someone gets to the top who seems to have done it entirely off the back of their first time investment. Sometimes that investment was as low as zero US Dollars and zero cents.

Annette Obrestad

Take for example Annette Obrestad, famous primarily for being the youngest WSOP bracelet winner in history – thanks to crazy European gaming laws, which allow eighteen years olds to gamble, drink, and smoke at the same age they are considered old enough to vote and drive. The Norwegian pro started playing somewhat under the legal age – fifteen to be precise – and also claims to have never dropped a single krone on her poker career.

She worked her way into a bankroll playing freerolls to start with, running those up into a decent stake and taking a stab at a couple of satellites for the 2007 inaugural WSOP main event in London just one day before her nineteenth birthday. She took home £1million in cash, which according to Cardplayer.com could be swapped for $2million US at the time. One wonders if the pound will ever be worth so much again in the post Brexit wasteland.

In contrast to this, her other claim to fame – having won a $4.00, 180-person sit-and-go with her cards blacked out just for shiggles – seems a paltry one financially, but it is indicative of how hard she worked on her game in those early years.

In the end, it clearly paid off for her: with $3.6million total in tournament cashes and a couple of EPT final tables, those initial freeroll winnings have been run up into a decent pile of potatoes.

Tom Dwan

Before Tom Dwan moved to Macau to trade twenty million dollar pots back and (mostly) forth across the felt with wealthy businessmen, Tom Dwan was the walking embodiment of internet kid-ness. Hair gelled into a teenager’s quiff, clad in t-shirt and hoodie, awkward in interviews and fearless on the table Dwan is/was the new face of poker.

Having played for a long time in the nosebleediest games out there, he is respected as one of the most dangerous players to have at your table by pretty much everyone but Phil Hellmuth who seems to have been convinced that Dwan wouldn’t be with us for long ever since he gave Phil a kicking in the National Heads-Up Championship in 2008.

The High Stakes Poker reg, is probably now the poster child for the card-players dream. In his final year of University he began his poker career with a $50 deposit. Playing mostly sit-and-goes he found the game almost ridiculously easy. It took him only a few months to run that fiddy up to over $10k.

He dropped out of his first year in graduate school with over $100,000 in his account. A fact which made it difficult to take his studies too seriously. With people selling jobs at the careers fair with five figure salaries, he found motivation hard to come by for anything other than his four figure a night poker sessions.

It wasn’t long before he was giving odds on a challenge to play anyone heads-up 4 tabling for six figure sums plus winnings to whoever came out with a profit. Now though, if the rumours of him being down and out in Macau are true, he may wish he had got that Masters in Engineering after all. He’s already got one hell of a hole in his CV for the last few years.

Chris Ferguson

In a twist on the Obrestad and Dwan story, Ferguson was an already established player with an ownership share and sponsorship deal with the Site Which Must Not Be Named when he decided to give himself the challenge of running up a $10,000 roll in one year online starting from $0 dollars.

He started out playing freerolls, which filled so quickly he would set an alarm in order to be ready to play them on time. The first few dollars took several weeks. Playing ten hours or so a week, he was able to run a few freeroll cashes into his first two dollars: the buy in he needed to sit at the .05/.10 tables. Short stacking like that, he went busto on a coinflip almost immediately and it was back to the freerolls.

But surprisingly he stuck with it. No wonder the man issues no apologies, that kind of discipline suggests a decidedly Seiborgian constitution. In the end it took him nearly nine months to run up his first $100. And another nine to turn that hundo-ball into his ten grand goal.

For him the whole experience was an exercise in discipline, managing his bankroll according to strict rules you can find here. It doesn’t work for everyone though. Daniel Negreanu tried something similar back in 2009, running a $10 bankroll up playing just full ring NL Holdem cash. Perhaps unsurprisingly – given the soul crushing nature of grinding the super micros – all my sources seem to suggest he burnt out on that one.

Got any first deposit success stories that deserve a shout out, share ‘em in the comments.