Why Is There Still No Online Poker Hall of Fame?

Who Can the Online Poker Hall of Fame Be Created For?

According to discussion, started by Aaron “abaroen68” Barone on X (ex-Twitter), the main candidates for inclusion in this Hall are players who have:

• Set any significant records in online poker 
• Helped online poker to grow
• Showed consistent results over a long period of time
• Contributed to the game’s fairness and integrity
• Took the game to a new level (creators of calculators, solvers, online poker theorists, etc.)

Over a couple of days, players even came up with nominees for membership in this Hall of Fame — in addition to Barone himself they are:

• Linus “ LLinusLLove” Loeliger
• Dmitry “ForHayley” Yaskevich
• Tomifey “TrueTeller” Kuznetsov
• Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond
• Jans “Graftekkel” Arends
• Ben “Sauce123” Sulsky
• Viktor “Isildur1” Blom
• Annette “Annette_15” Obrestad
• Isaac “IluvtheWNBA” Haxton
• Shaun Deeb
• Chris “Moorman1” Moorman
• Niklas “Lena900” Astedt
• Chad “lilholdem954” Batista (M8kingmoves)
• Jonathan “apestyles” Van Fleet
• Doug “WCGrider” Polk
• Tony “tuff_fish”
• Frederik “H@££INGGOL” Halling 
• Tom “durrrr” Dwan
• Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies
• Vietcong
• Benjamin “xthesteinx” Zamani
• Thayer “Thay3r” Rasmussen
• Steve “gboro780” Gross
• Vanessa Kade
• Tim “BegsClutch” Begley
• Jonas “Otb_RedBaron” Mols
• Halfrek
• Isaac “westmenloAA” Baron
• Dan “Jungleman” Cates
• Derek “derek8” Lerner
• Patrick “pads” Leonard
• Lex Veldhuis
• Benjamin “Spragg” Spragg
• Patrick “Tonkaaaap” Talbot
• Simon “C.Darwin2” Mattson
• Samuel “€urop€an“ Vousden
• Keven “stammdogg” Stammen
• Laszlo “omaha4rollz” Bujtas
• Oleg Ostroumov

This is just a small portion of a huge list of people, many of whom are known only by their nickname, with no first names, last names or faces to link them to. What do they all have in common?

The vast majority either stopped playing poker, at least online, back in the mid-2010s — or their success, records, and influence on the game predate the solver era.

However, leaving poker behind doesn’t negate the fact that someone could have achieved something in poker that would later be immortalized in the Hall of Fame. So why isn’t there one?

There are a bunch of minor and three major reasons: the impossibility of even roughly measuring a player’s true success and skill level, and the anonymity of online poker.

Issue #1: How to Evaluate an Online Player’s Success?

SharkScope, the largest online MTT statistics portal, has a limited pool of rooms and networks from which it parses data, does not record all results, and has not been able to receive information from the #1 poker room, GGPoker, since 2023.

The oldest online MTT statistics and rankings site, PocketFives, officially died in 2024, shutting down its entire database of online results dating back to 2005.

Most websites that collect online cash games statistics, such as Statname, consider a narrow list of rooms and apps, and often collect incomplete information.

At the same time, the rooms themselves, with the exception of PhenomPoker, do not publish the results of their players in real time anywhere.

As a result, collecting unified information about how much each player wins in online poker, how many titles they have, and so on, is practically impossible. It is also worth remembering that a winning graph from one room doesn’t necessarily mean that the player doesn’t lose more in another room or rooms. But we can’t check any of these.

Issue #2: How to Assess an Online Player’s Skills

Let’s say that with the legendary players of 2000-2010, we can somehow sort out the issue of assessing skills. But what about those who made their mark on poker history after the first commercially available solver appeared in 2012?

In a time of regular scandals involving real-time assistance, multi-accounting, ghosting, collusion, and other forms of cheating in online rooms, assessing a player’s “pure” skill to recognize them as the best and worthy of inclusion in the Hall of Fame is an extremely difficult task.

Moreover, it is unclear who should carry it out — how to select competent people for this, who will select them, and how will they evaluate the skills of others?

And don’t forget another problem: what to do in a situation where a player gets into the Hall and then it turns out that their results were obtained dishonestly and this person is not really as skilled as it initially seemed?

Assessing people’s poker skills is difficult enough but when solvers, calculators, bots, and other skill substitutes constantly loom in the background, how can you do it without making a mistake?

Issue #3: What to Do With Anonymous Players?

Finally, one of the most controversial aspects of the expulsion of members of the Online Poker Hall of Fame: a lot of them aren’t actually known as living human beings.

Since online rooms protect their clients’ personal data, and many players avoid any deanonymization of their nicknames, the problem of establishing their identity for inclusion in the Hall is quite acute.

One might object: what’s the problem with including someone like Gibberish23210 simply as a nickname and their most famous avatar in a major room?

Well, without knowing the identity of the player, we cannot be sure that one specific person plays under this nickname.

Moreover, people hide their data for a reason. Many don’t want to attract unnecessary attention to their identity, no matter how well they play or how legendary they are in the community. And the reasons for this are just as numerous as those for players hiding their profit. Some don’t want to expose results to family and friends, others avoid problems with their country of residence or citizenship, and the rest simply choose online poker for its anonymity.

In live poker, the situation is different because it is a real person playing at each table — you can’t hide, at most you can cover your face with glasses and a mask with a hood.

Depriving people of anonymity for the sake of inclusion in the formal Hall of the best, which may bring them additional problems in life, in this context appears to be a decision that contradicts the fundamental idea of ​​people’s freedom on the Internet.

Does This Mean There Is No Need for an Online Poker Hall of Fame?

More likely yes than no. Instead of creating a separate Hall for online players, the WSOP could simply create a subsection for online stars and begin inducting ones from the 2000s for specific achievements, leaving the more recent (and complex) nominations to future generations.

After all, despite the complexity of post-solver player evaluation, the people who pioneered online poker’s explosive growth haven’t ceased to be legends — which means they remain worthy of official recognition. But only if their real names are known or they’re willing to reveal them. The anonymity of others should be respected.