It’s Sunday again, which means it’s time for another throwback. Today we’re going further back than usual — before AirdropAlert, before crypto, before the world trip. This one is about the decade I spent playing poker.
Why tell a poker story on an airdrop site? Because the crypto lessons from poker are real: almost every strategy I use today was built on fundamentals I developed at the tables. Risk management, exploiting bonus systems, spotting edges before the crowd — I didn’t learn any of that from crypto. Poker taught me first, and crypto just gave me a bigger table. You’ll see those fundamentals forming throughout this story.
I played for around ten years. First home games, then casinos, then online. When people hear “poker pro,” they picture high roller events, a lavish lifestyle, or winning a tournament for a million dollars. My story was slower than that. I wasn’t a brilliant kid who immediately crushed the online high stakes games. I had to find my way.
The $100 That Kept Disappearing
Around 2009 there was a big poker boom. I always liked competitive games, so naturally I found it interesting. Playing against some friends, I quickly noticed I had an edge. Very basic, but an edge. And thinking about the strategy was genuinely fun.
So I deposited $100 online. Lost it. Tried again. Lost it again. Maybe this wasn’t for me?
It took a couple of weeks before I tried a third time. In between, I learned about a concept called bankroll management. The short version: if you have $100, don’t sit in a $50 game. Crypto traders know the same rule as risk management — size your positions so variance can’t wipe you out — and it’s still the first lesson I’d give anyone entering either game. I started over with small Sit and Go tournaments, $1-2 buy-ins, and ran that $100 up to $500. Finally, I was winning.
In the meantime, I was slowly getting better at the home games, the bar games, and later the casino games. Within a year, I was comfortably winning — not big money yet, but winning.
The lifestyle started taking shape too. I began doing poker trips across Europe and to Las Vegas with my poker friends from Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Play in higher games, have fun with friends, come home with more than you left with. It’s a good formula.
Three Balls in the Air
Through 2009 I was juggling three things: a day job, a bachelor’s degree in accounting, and poker. Three balls in the air, and only one of them was paying off. When my online winnings hit around $60k a year, the math was undeniable. In 2010 I went all in on the ball that worked, and turned pro.
To understand what that number meant to me, you need the context. I come from humble beginnings. Most of my peers were making €20-25k a year — before taxes — in regular jobs. Making $60k from a side hustle felt like being king of the world to the young adult version of me.
The Stand-Alone House Dream
Here’s how modest my dreams were back then. Where I’m from in the Netherlands, nearly every house is connected wall to wall to the neighbors. A “stand-alone” house — detached, with space around it — was pure status. My daydream as a young adult was owning one of those someday, maybe earning €5k a month. Honestly, I thought that was the highest I could go in life.
Poker cracked that ceiling open. It wasn’t just money — it felt like an opportunity to break out of the matrix. That was never the stated goal, but it was always somewhere in the back of my mind. The decision paid for itself quickly, and I’ll spare you the exact numbers from the years after. Poker was no longer the side game. It was the job.
(I documented some of this era in real time on my old PokerStrategy blog — the original posts are still up, typos and all.)
Full Tilt and the 30% Haircut
In 2011, Full Tilt Poker introduced me to rakeback: 27% of the rake I paid, returned automatically every month. For a new pro, that’s a beautiful safety net. Even in a losing month, something comes back in.
Then, barely a year into life as a full-time pro, Full Tilt went bankrupt. Around 30% of my bankroll was stuck on the site, and my rakeback cushion vanished with it. Welcome to professional poker.
That haircut still steers how I handle money today. My funds live spread across different wallets and different exchanges, never too much behind one point of failure. Anyone who kept their whole stack on FTX in 2022 learned the exact lesson Full Tilt taught me in 2011: the platform is a counterparty, not a vault.
Now what? Digging around, I found that sites on a different network — iPoker — were offering 50% rakeback deals. I moved my action there, and this is when the rakeback grind really started.
The Rakeback Grind
At first I was collecting around $2.5-3k a month in rakeback while winning a few thousand at the tables, mostly multi-tabling $1/$2 games with $200 buy-ins. A solid living. But I kept digging for better deals, and I found a site on the same network offering 55% flat rakeback — plus rake races on top.
That changed the math completely. If I multi-tabled five days a week, I figured I could pull $10-15k per month in rakeback and race prizes combined. So I went hard. The target became 80,000 to 100,000 hands per month.
It worked. I started hitting top 3 in the races while collecting the flat rakeback every month. But here’s the catch nobody warns you about: when you put in that kind of volume, your game starts to slip. My win rate at the tables eroded until I was essentially a break-even player who earned his entire income from bonuses.
If you know casino bonus farming — finding a neutral strategy and grinding the bonus system — it was basically that. Just executed at absurd volume, millions of hands. Anyone farming DEX airdrops right now is living the exact same grind: trading back and forth for points, breaking even (or slightly worse) on the trades themselves, betting the whole thing on the rewards at the end. Swap “hands per month” for “volume per epoch” and my 2012 spreadsheet looks identical to a 2026 points dashboard. The reward was never in the game — it was in the incentive system built around the game. I was running that playbook a decade before “airdrop farming” was a phrase.
The Break-Even Blues
I lived that grind for a little over two years — closer to two and a half by the end. But being a break-even player, putting in millions of hands? It is very high variance, and honestly draining for the brain. By heart, I like to win. And there I was, stacking losing days, losing weeks, sometimes losing months, while the bonus income quietly kept me profitable in the background.
By heart, I like to win. And there I was, playing a game I love, grinding break-even, farming a bonus system. It’s a depressing kind of life, funny enough. Something had to change.
Three Reasons to Leave the Netherlands
While all this was happening, the Netherlands was tightening its rules on online poker. Winning players had to pay 29% tax per month — and you couldn’t deduct your losing months. Think about what that means in a game with natural swings. With two or three losing months in a year, which is completely normal in poker, your effective rate lands around 40%.
At the same time, I watched poker friends living in Malta: tax free, improving fast, partying every weekend. The picture became clear. I had three reasons to leave the Netherlands:
- Taxes — the biggest one by far.
- A poker house with peers — you improve much faster living and working alongside other pros.
- Travel and party with peers — because why not.
The way I framed it: if the move saves me the tax bill and makes me improve faster, the travel is basically free, and I compound quicker. Easy decision.
Funny enough, the Netherlands is running the same playbook on crypto today. Box 3 wealth tax — which covers crypto holdings — keeps climbing, and politicians are openly discussing taxing unrealized gains. Sound familiar?
If poker had never found me and I was a full-time crypto guy in 2026, I would make the exact same choice. Taxes and regulations getting too heavy? Relocate to a tax-friendly country, move in with some peers who are full-time web3, and travel. Same formula, different era.
Looking back, making that big decision was probably the catalyst for everything that followed. Leaving the Netherlands didn’t just fix a tax problem — it put me on the road that led to Italy, to Bitcoin, to the world trip, and eventually to AirdropAlert. One uncomfortable choice, and the whole life unlocked behind it.
Why Italy Instead of Malta
The original plan was joining the guys I knew in Malta. Then Italy did something interesting: they closed off their entire online poker market, ring-fencing it so Italians could only play against Italians — and crucially, they taxed the poker sites instead of the players.
Two things made this attractive. First, Italian players had a reputation for being pretty bad. Second, a player-side tax problem simply didn’t exist there. The whole reason Italy sealed the market was to charge the sites, not the grinders.
So I gave it a shot and relocated to Italy instead.
The Credit Card Loop
Around the same time, I found a way to cover some of the rakeback I was giving up by leaving the old network: a credit card that paid 1% cashback — including on poker site deposits.
You can see where this is going. I deposited every day, played my sessions, withdrew at the end of the day, and repeated. In a single year I ran something like $3-4 million through that card, collecting 1% on the way through. The loop stayed alive for about three years before the card companies started clipping it.
Easiest $100k of my life. Those doors are long closed now — the cards killed deposit cashback ages ago — but for a few years it was free money for clicking buttons I was already clicking. That instinct never left me. Spotting a small edge in a system, then running volume through it until someone patches it: that’s the credit card loop, that’s rakeback, and years later, that’s exactly how the best airdrop seasons got farmed.
The Drive South
I didn’t move to Italy alone. In 2011 I’d met a guy at the online tables — he had a funny Dutch screen name, we started chatting in the table chat, and we exchanged Skype handles. For about a year we talked poker and life almost daily without ever meeting.
When I told him about the Italy plan, he wanted in. So I picked him up in my Volkswagen Polo and we drove straight to Italy. Today he’s one of my closest friends.
Italy fixed everything at once. I reduced my volume and started winning again. Funny enough, the bonuses I gave up were more than replaced by actual profit at the tables — winning made me more money than farming ever did. The game became fun again too. Winning weekly, winning monthly, collecting some rakeback, exploiting a credit card loop on the side. Good times.
The Friend Who Wouldn’t Shut Up About Bitcoin
One more thing about my road trip companion. Somewhere in 2012, living in Italy, he started telling me about a strange internet money called Bitcoin.
I listened. I found it interesting. And then I did what most people did in 2012: nothing. It took me a while before my first buy — and when I finally pulled the trigger, I paid a lot more than I would have if I’d listened straight away.
That story — the tip, the wait, the buy, and what it eventually turned into — deserves its own Sunday. See you then.
Final Words: The Crypto Lessons From Poker
Nobody’s poker story looks like the movies. Mine was bankroll management, spreadsheets, rakeback percentages, tax law, and a Volkswagen Polo full of poker chips driving to Italy. Every lesson from that grind came with me into crypto: volume matters, edges decay, bonus systems exist to be farmed, and sometimes the best move is changing the game entirely instead of playing the old one harder.
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