Doyle Brunson Reminisces About Missed $230M Deal On Poker Room

Seven years after Doyle Brunson parted with his namesake poker room – Doyles Room, he says that he still regrets not selling the website which would have earned him $230 million.

Author, poker columnist and creative director of Poker Night in America Nolan Dalla has started to publish on his blog a series of essays titled ‘20 Years of Online Poker: Tales of Fast Money, Wicked Beats, and Broken Mice‘. The essay looks back on how online poker started with Planet Poker and how it crashed and thrived in the last two decades.

In response to the new blog by Dalla, Brunson went to Twitter to remind Dalla to include the success and fall of Doyles Room, Brunson’s online poker room which was established in 2004.

During its peak, Doyles Room was one of the most famous online poker rooms and home to some of poker’s best and brightest players including Amit Makhija, David Sands, Steve Gross and Chris Moorman. But in 2006, Doyles Room was one of the many that folded to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), only to come back a year later to operate in legal grey area.

When it went live again, Doyles Room began jumping from one network to another: Microgaming (Prima) Poker Network in 2007, then to the Cake Poker Network in January 2009, and then to Yatahay Network in January 2011. Right after Black Friday in 2011, Doyles Room became one of the many online poker rooms seized in accordance with the investigation concerning the violation of online gambling laws. Following Black Friday, Brunson decided to cut ties with Doyles Room and the website was acquired by Americas Cardroom.

Brunson’s regret echoes the sentiment made by Poker Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu, who also lost so much after the UIGEA. In an episode of Card Player’s Poker Stories Podcast, Negreanu shared that before the UIGEA hit, he received an offer for $170 million for his website- Full Contact Poker. The deal didn’t push through since UIGEA happened only three days after the offer was made.

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More than 50 years after becoming a professional poker player, Brunson is still playing in handpicked online and live tournaments. One of his most recent victories was at the $25,000 Poker After Dark at Holidays where he placed 6th .