One of the most successful poker tournament players ever really had to grind for his first wins.
The main event for the World Series of Poker has wrapped up, and most of us have given up our Balatro obsessions, at least for now. For Justin Bonomo, however, poker is almost always front of mind. One of the winningest tournament players of all time with lifetime earnings exceeding $60 million, it’s fair to say that Bonomo is one of the best in the business. He might not have ever reached those heights without an unlikely source of help, however: Bonomo’s first foray into poker was bankrolled by the sale of his EverQuest character.
At just 14 years old, Bonomo was racking up victories playing Magic: the Gathering, winning thousands of dollars in college scholarships crushing the Junior Super Series and moving on to the Pro Tour itself. It was through his friends playing Magic that he heard about EverQuest, and it hooked him immediately.
“I loved the game, definitely got obsessed with it,” Bonomo told me in a recent interview. “Played as much as I could, but we had dial-up internet so whenever I played that meant no one else could use the phone. Because of that I was only allowed to play two hours a day, but I absolutely looked forward to those two hours and wished I could play longer.”
For us old EverQuest heads, this is a familiar tale. You’re riding on the boat from Butcherblock to Freeport, somebody picks up the phone, and suddenly your corpse is at the bottom of the ocean, an hour plus of recovery ahead of you. EQ was a new experience, and people couldn’t get enough. It was so popular that it overwhelmed the city of San Diego’s internet capacity, resulting in a weeklong outage and the ISP having to literally run new cable to Los Angeles to manage the demand. Bonomo was just as enchanted as everyone else.
“It was my first time ever playing such an immersive game. You were in this world, and you could explore it and do so many crazy things. I remember explaining to people that just one zone is the equivalent of miles across, and you could spend hours just traveling the world without seeing the same place twice. Back then, that was a very uncommon thing.”
He spent as much time as he could in Norrath, and it wasn’t long before he decided he wanted to be among the best of the best (I’m detecting a trend here). He got max level, joined the top raiding guild on his server, and had a blast destroying all the best raid targets the Shadows of Luclin expansion had to offer. Mostly bullet sponges shaped like snakes, if I’m being honest. But life happens, and eventually EverQuest started to take a back seat.
I don’t even remember how I met the guy, but it was over AOL Instant Messenger and he offered me $500 to sell my character.
Justin Bonomo
A few months passed, and some of Bonomo’s Magic friends had moved on to poker. It’s a common trend, with former Magic pros doing big numbers at the biggest tournaments in the game. Folks like Brock Parker, Dave Williams, and Eric Froelich have all made the transition, taking the skills they honed slinging spells and deploying them to rake in prizes at poker tournaments.
It was around this time that Justin decided to sell his EverQuest character.
“I don’t even remember how I met the guy, but it was over AOL Instant Messenger and he offered me $500 to sell my character,” he said. “He paid me on Paypal and a few months later I got into poker and deposited that money onto paradisepoker.com and was grinding 50c/$1 limit hold ’em games with it.”
EverQuest was a revolutionary game when it launched. (Image credit: 989 Studios)
MMO makers have done what they can to crack down on account selling since, but the concept of digital ownership was newer then, and it was the wild west. Certain games writers have even been known to tell stories of selling EverQuest plat online to pay for beer money in college, not that I would know anything about that. So Bonomo sold his druid, used the money as his very first poker bankroll, and started grinding.
EverQuest will always have a special place in my heart.
Justin Bonomo
It didn’t take him long to hit the bigs. After getting his sea legs playing online, Bonomo started playing in-person tournaments. He became the youngest player to be featured at a televised final table at the EPT French Open in 2005 at just 19 years old. On the pressure of big moments, he had this to say:
“Sometimes in poker people will ask me if I get nervous under pressure and I tell them the first time I ever played a match for a thousand dollars heads up I was thirteen or fourteen years old in a match at the end of a Magic tournament. I’ve just been competing at the highest levels my whole life, so I’m super experienced and comfortable with it.”
With three WSoP bracelets to his name now, you might think Bonomo wouldn’t have time for the classic MMO that started his story, but you’d be wrong. He still plays EverQuest, and was even a part of the infamous waking of the Sleeper on p99 Green. Like many of us, he has strong feelings about the game. “EverQuest will always have a special place in my heart. Anytime I think about it or swap stories with someone I get flooded with nostalgia.”
EverQuest just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and with private servers flourishing and no signs of official development stopping anytime soon, hopefully we’ll all have plenty of opportunities to relive that nostalgia and create some new stories together in Norrath.
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