Most of you know that I was a professional poker player from 2005-2021. The skills I learned surviving poker have helped me greatly when it comes to surviving crypto. Things like risk and bankroll management, thinking in probabilities, game selection, mental resilience, and so on.
But those skills are not what I want to talk about today. I’ve been thinking about the similarities between poker and crypto from a macro level, in terms of the opportunities, and how easy it was and is to make money in both spaces.
Then I started thinking about how things changed for poker, and how things are changing for crypto, and what it might mean for the future. That’s what I want to talk about today. Starting with looking back at the history of poker.
The golden age of online poker ran from something like 2003 to 2014. It kicked off when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP in 2003. Fast internet was becoming a household staple, and the ability for people to watch someone play and win money at poker on ESPN and then immediately go to their computer and start playing the same game was the spark that lit a decade of poker mania.
Regulations were sparse to non-existent. The competition amongst poker websites was fierce, and they all offered abundant sign-up and playing bonuses to capture market share. The average level of skill was extremely low. It was a gold rush, and a golden age for making money playing poker if you put a bit of time and effort into figuring out the game.
Basic strategies worked. It didn’t take much time and effort to become a winning player. It was easy to get lucky, and a LOT of people got lucky. The barrier to entry was also low: you didn’t need any formal training, you just needed an internet connection. Because of freerolls, you could start from zero. Sound familiar?
Crypto shares so many of these traits. You don’t need formal training to make it in crypto, you just need an internet connection, and thanks to airdrops, anyone can start from actual zero. A lot of people have made a lot of money, and some very basic strategies have work extremely well for people.
As time went on, people got better. The games got tougher. The amount of skill required to beat the games went up. Simple strategies no longer worked, you now had to spend significant time studying your game. Studying your opponents. Learning math, learning statistics, learning game theory.
Bots and AI programs that can play game theoretically perfect poker got better and better, and made it tougher and tougher for humans to compete. It reached the point where you basically needed to adopt an “if you can’t beat em, join em” approach and learn the best game theory from these AI programs (solvers) or get left behind.
In the mid 2000s, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. By 2010, it was decently hard work to be a successful poker player, but many people could do it. Beyond 2015, only the best of the best survived.
It required a very strong work ethic, it required discipline, it required regularly studying the game and utilizing the latest advancements in training tools.
In 2025, poker is still around. There are still winners and losers and professional players. But it is infinitely tougher than it used to be. The golden era is over. The glory days of shooting fish in a barrel is over. Everyone getting lucky and falling ass backwards into a pile of money… those days are over.
And the same thing is happening to crypto.
I predict the crypto space is currently around where online poker was in 2012. There are still plenty of opportunities, and it’s still possible for many people to make it with a bit of work. But it’s no longer like shooting fish in a barrel.
ICOs, DeFi Summer, and NFT season were the golden eras. It’s hard mode now. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this was inevitable.
It means the easy days of making a 10x on an NFT mint simply because you can click a button faster than others, are over.
It means that to find the best airdrops and take advantage of them, you have to put in more time and effort (and sometimes capital) than you did a few years ago.
It means that the rewards are getting smaller, the competition is growing more fierce, and you need a greater and greater edge to “make it”.
It means that you need to adjust your expectations. If you are still trying to navigate this space the way you did a few years ago, you’re gonna have a bad time. I think most people have gotten the memo now that things are different now and this cycle is tougher, but perhaps where some people still need a wake up call is on the fact that those days aren’t coming back.
You hear a lot of people calling for the next alt season. The next NFT season. The glory days of 2021 to return again. While I think we’ll get pockets of these things and more — moments where alts and NFTs shine — I don’t think we ever see a return to those same golden days.
You also see a lot of people saying things are gonna get better when “retail gets here”. My friend, retail is here. They’ve been, they’ve been burned, and they’ve left. They’ve come back, been burned again, and left. It’s 2025 and just about anyone that has ever had any interest in speculating on crypto would have done so by now.
The way retail is now entering the market is by allocating a small percentage of their portfolio to DCAing into Bitcoin via ETFs. That’s great. That’s great for the adoption of crypto and the overall success and longevity of our space. We’ve made it. What it’s not good for is a speculative golden era coming back again.
Just because the golden days might be behind us, doesn’t mean you can’t still find an edge and make money. It’s just gonna be tougher this time around. It requires the same things it did to be a successful poker player in the mid to late 2010s: discipline, a strong work ethic, regularly studying the game, and utilizing the latest tools and resources.
What does this look like in crypto? It means reading more whitepapers yourself, coming up with your own theses, being a part of groups where you’re all helping each other find opportunities early. It means taking a much more disciplined approach to your trading: keep a trading log, keep a journal, have a plan for when to take profit.
If you want to make money “in crypto”, aside from long term investing, you need to be realistic with yourself. Be honest with the amount of work it takes and the fact that it’s only going to get tougher from here on out.
There are still plenty of edges to be found. It just requires more work to find them, and more work to take advantage of them.
While there are a tonne of similarities between the golden days of poker and the early days of crypto, there are some key differences.
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Poker is purely a zero-sum game. While a lot of crypto is zero-sum, not all of it is. Blockchain technology adds value to the world. There is real technology here, and real adoption, and it is not going away any time soon.
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Unlike in poker, you have alternate options. You don’t have to be an active trader catching the latest trends to make money. You can simply DCA into Bitcoin and get exposure to the whole space.
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I firmly believe that crypto adoption will multiply tenfold from here. Eventually, everyone in the world will be interacting with blockchain tech one way or another. Poker was and will always be limited by the number of people that want to play some cards.
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The longterm view for poker has been bleak for a while. The longterm view for crypto is about as bright as it has ever been. Global adoption, practical use cases, and constructive regulation all make greater adoption inevitable.
So while I think that the golden age is over in the making-easy-money sense, the golden age for crypto as a whole is still ahead of us. It will look and feel different and the opportunities won’t be as abundant, but that might be a good thing. It’ll mean fewer scammers and scams, it’ll mean fewer garbage projects getting funded, it’ll mean the extractors will win less and the builders will win more.
I hope this wasn’t a downer of a read. I think it’s pragmatic, and at least for me, helpful to reflect on my experience watching what happened to the poker industry.
One of the regrets I always had was not taking more advantage of things before they got tougher with poker. I suspect many people also have the same feeling with crypto: regretting that they didn’t take more advantage in 2021 or another time in the past.
Well, we can’t change the past. I’ll tell you that in 2016, I was regretting not taking more advantage of poker in 2012. In 2030, I bet there’ll be an entire cohort of people wishing they took crypto a bit more seriously in 2025.
The golden age might be behind us, but the future is still bright.
I truly believe that.
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