How Pokerroom.com Began

The Story of Pokerroom.com and Their Owners

“How they went from broke to rich in a matter of years”

The story of the Pokerroom.com owners isn’t one of the boring stories you hear everyday. The owners were true grinders before online poker went nuts. Of all the history of poker, these guys story is my favorite.

Oskar Hornell and Claes Lidell were simply college students when they first started with poker. Neither of them had a lot of money and were determined to make money from poker.

It all started in their psychology class when their professor was talking about statistics. The professor mentioned that you could beat casinos with the use of statistics. This immediately rung a bell in the young kid’s brain.

The two friends began touring the world playing Black Jack and counting cards. After being thrown out of just about every single casino in Europe for winning too much they decided to travel to the . This is where they began playing poker.

Oskar and Claes were true grinders. They read every single poker book they could get their hands on. Not only did they read them, they re-read them. They were determined to make this their life.

After playing and grinding it out at the poker tables in the casinos they decided to buy the domain PokerRoom.com. They both had a sense that the Internet was going to be huge one day. Who would have known that the purchase of that domain would be one of most lucrative domains in the world?

They developed a software program with one of their friends. The program was one of the first of its kind. They were actually the first poker software to be compatible for Windows, Linux, and Macs which most people don’t know. Poker for Mac users was unheard of at this time. Actually poker for Linux was even more rare.

They were scrapping by offering free money games and advertising by word of mouth. After two years they finally decided to offer real money. They couldn’t have done it at a better time. Around this time the World Poker Tour was just beginning to air on TV. Poker soon became the hottest thing. That combined with a strong poker affiliate team, they dominated. The rest is history from there. Not bad for two young grinders.

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