Jim Halpert Used To Sit At His Desk And Play On PokerStars, I Wonder If He Was Any Good

I was watching The Office over the weekend, as I do most weekends, and was watching the episode when Jim proposes to Pam. If you recall, he is on the phone with her but switches to IM, which is when we see this conversation:

First of all, how about a little creativity out of your screenname, Jim? I guess it’s better than “Paperguy1234″ but still, I expect something better from Tuna. Pams is obviously so Pam it hurts, but it’s actually not too bad either.

But if you look to the left hand side of the AIM convo, what do you see? Free AOL, and oh yes, PokerStars! This is probably my 14th time re-watching The Office, and some how, some way, I’ve never noticed that Jim was grinding on Stars between sales calls, pranking Dwight, hanging out at Pam’s desk, and Michael’s conference room meetings. So that begs the question, do we think Jim was any good?

On one hand, yes. Jim was playing Stars back in 2007-2008, where there were a ton of bad players. From watching the show, we know Jim is quick, smart, and has the keen ability to react to situations rationally instead of overreacting or losing his mind. He’s calm and collected, necessary for most winning poker players. And also, he played on Bodog too,

so it’s entirely possible he was game selecting and multitabling. So yes, it’s very possible Jim was good.

On the other hand, Jim has never put effort into anything. He just goes about his day, not a care in the world. There’s little chance he put any time or thought into beating the game. It’s a possibility he would just toss 50 bucks onto it on a slow day, play a little, and then go home, and not care or pay attention to if he was winning or losing. It was basically just a way to kill time for him, between everything else going on, just another way not to do work.

So maybe he was good, maybe he was jus dicking around during the day. I like to believe he was making decent enough money, which allowed him to later buy his parent’s house as a surprise for Pam. And people thought Jim was lazy? As it turns out he was actually working two jobs at once.