Editors Note: I have introduced myself in the forum, but it was suggested that maybe I write something a bit more detailed here. As I got into writing this “introduction” post it swelled beyond my expectations, so I have divided it into three parts. It’s basically a bit of the history of the industry and my very small part in it. I hope you find it interesting.

My real name is Craig, but my online moniker is Gonzo. Please don’t ask about the name; it’s boring. But just know that I am neither Mexican nor a Hunter S. Thompson fan. I joined Poker Affiliate Solutions in May as a Content Specialist. I have now spent 7 years in the online poker industry and as I write this, I wonder where all the time went. I think I may be one of the few remaining people online who doesn’t have a blog or who has never written a blog post (is that a cliché thing to say for a first blog post?), which is further shocking due to the fact I have probably written and posted over a million words on the internet.

I first started playing poker in 2001 or so at Paradise Poker. Prior to that, I had played at a few online casinos when I discovered that there was money to be made in casino bonuses. Unfortunately, it didn’t really dawn on me truly how great those bonuses were back then but I did end up making a few bucks. Once I played a few hours of blackjack at an online casino, poker seemed like a natural progression. Playing online casinos was fun in its own way, but I’ll never forget the rush of playing against other people. This was before the online poker boom, so a lot of the action was still Stud. I gravitated towards this game at the time because it was the closest thing I remember to the game I played occasionally as a kid. Anyway, I think I managed to win a couple hundred bucks or so playing relatively small stakes at a game I basically knew little strategy. Of course, I eventually lost it all. Being relatively cheap, I decided I had enough and moved on.

Forward to 2003, a good friend of my mine who I have known since middle school, Jek187 (some may remember him from BW or 2+2), who also played around with me at those Paradise Poker tables, encouraged me to give poker another look. Jek has a great analytical mind and always tries to optimize many parts of his life. He is the type of person that when he gives advice, especially backed with statistics, you listen and don’t argue. By this time he had read up a lot on poker, and was playing a lot at the local poker rooms and online. He suggested I purchase a little book called “Hold’em Poker” by David Sklansky and start checking out the 2+2 forums. Man, what great advice! I began studying the starting hand charts, learning which hands to raise and fold, how to semi-bluff and the relatively simple math of pot odds.

Around this time, Jek launches a site called BonusWhores.com, a very basic looking site straight out of the late nineties that was a collection of information he had gathered through his experiences playing poker online. The site name was based on a term he and a few other fellow 2+2 posters created, called "Bonus Whoring," which is essentially the practice of taking maximum advantage of promotions — primarily bonuses — that poker sites offer to players (all perfectly legal under the site’s terms and conditions). The site turned out to be one of the first sites of its kind. Not only did the site provide honest details on poker bonuses, but also other objective information that players were concerned about at the time, which was especially helpful given players’ hesitance to put money into what were unknown offshore poker sites.

My poker playing was just starting to get rolling when Jek informed me of his new site. He had his rooms organized by traffic size, so Party Poker was at the top of the list. Since I had last played, they had taken over the lead from Paradise Poker. Chris Moneymaker had won the World Series of Poker and the WPT was becoming extremely popular on the Travel Channel. A poker boom was underway. And Jek had just created a great way to inform players about the murky world -- to many -- of the top online poker sites.

If I recall correctly, Party Poker had a 25% up to $100 sign-up bonus back then. The thought of depositing $400 at a poker site seemed to be a bit crazy but Jek did it and now he had a site devoted to it, so hey, it must be ok, right? So I took my $400 deposit to the Party Poker tables in October of 2003 and started to apply my new poker prowess to the $0.50/$1.00 Limit Hold’em tables. Within a few hours of play, I was up $100 or so and had cleared the $100 sign-up bonus. It was incredibly exciting, but I tried to look at it rationally – I had also won money initially at Paradise a couple years prior and that didn’t turn out so hot. So I played again the next day, and the following day, and then next day. Soon my sessions were getting longer and I was thinking about poker all the time. I also started playing 4 tables, then 8, then 16. This seemed absolutely insane at the time, but by some miracle from the heavens, I was winning. And the more I played, the more I won. I remember in my early naive days, actually feeling bad for the players I was playing against and also feeling bad for the “easy” money I was receiving from the poker sites. I wasn’t even winning that much by comparison to the higher stakes players, but it seemed like a lot to me at the time.

Granted, I wasn’t winning every session. I wasn’t even winning every day, but I could tell by the quality of the play at the tables that I was superior to the people I was playing against and that I was not simply getting lucky. When I did go on a losing streak, I had the Party Poker reload bonuses to help ease the pain. With my winnings and frequent deposits, the money I had online -- which I would have previously been horrified by -- I now didn’t give a second thought to.

Stay tuned for Part II next week