Online
poker is the game of poker played over the Internet.
It has been partly responsible for a dramatic
increase in the number of poker players worldwide.
In 2005, revenues from online poker were estimated
at US$ 200 million per month.
Online
venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper because
they have much smaller overhead costs. For example,
adding another table does not take up valuable space
like it would for a brick and mortar casino. Online
poker rooms also allow the players to play for low
stakes (as low as 2¢) and often offer poker freeroll
tournaments (where there is no entry fee), attracting
beginners.
Free
poker online was played as early as the late 1990s
in the form of IRC poker. Planet Poker was the first
online cardroom to offer real money games. The first
real money poker game was dealt on January 1, 1998.
Author Mike Caro became the "face" of Planet
Poker in October 1999.
The
major online poker sites offer varying features to
entice new players. One common feature is to offer
tournaments called satellites by which the winners
gain entry to real-life poker tournaments. It was
through one such tournament on PokerStars that Chris
Moneymaker won his entry to the 2003 World
Series of Poker. He went on to win the main event
causing shock in the poker world. The 2004 World Series
featured three times as many players as in 2003. At
least four players in the WSOP final table won their
entry through an online cardroom. Like Moneymaker,
2004 winner Greg "Fossilman" Raymer also
won his entry at the PokerStars online cardroom.
In
October 2004, Sportingbet Plc, at the time the world's
largest publicly traded online gaming company (SBT.L),
announced the acquisition of ParadisePoker.com, one
of the online poker industry's first and largest cardrooms.
The $340 million dollar acquisition marked the first
time an online cardroom was owned by a public company.
Since then, several other cardroom parent companies
have gone public.
In
June 2005, PartyGaming, the parent company of the
then largest online cardroom, PartyPoker,
went public on the London Stock Exchange, achieving
an initial public offering market value in excess
of $8 billion dollars. At the time of the IPO, ninety-two
percent of Party
Gaming's income came from poker operations.
The
market appears to be currently in a consolidation
phase. In early 2006, PartyGaming moved to acquire
EmpirePoker.com from Empire Online. Later in the year,
bwin, an Austrian based online gambling company, acquired
PokerRoom.com. Other poker rooms such as PokerStars
and Poker.com that were rumored to be exploring initial
public offerings have postponed them.
As
of March 2008, there are fewer than forty stand-alone
cardrooms and poker networks with detectable levels
of traffic. There are more than 600 independent doorways
into the group of network sites. (Credit: Wikipedia).
