Where And How To Play Poker Online
The traditional venues for playing poker, brick and mortar casinos and poker rooms, can be intimidating for new players. And casinos have also been reluctant to make adequate room for card rooms up until recently, because of the lower profits from poker. Casinos would make much more money if they replaced poker rooms with slot machines or other traditional casino games.
By contrast, online venues are dramatically cheaper because of the smaller overhead costs. Adding more tables costs an online poker room nothing and takes up no valuable space, but makes dozens of players who can sit at those new tables happy. This is how the online venues can let players sit at tables with such low stakes, going all the way down to 1/2, and offer promotions like freeroll tournaments (meaning no entry fee).
There are lots of promotions and features that online poker sites offer to attract new players. Satellite tournaments are a major feature, in which the winner will gain entry into a real-life poker tournament, usually a major one like the World Series of Poker. Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP and he gained entry through a satellite. The popularity of poker, specifically texas hold em, exploded and the following year saw three times as many entrants into the WSOP. In 2004 four players at the final table had all won entry through a satellite tournament, and Greg Raymer, who won that year, was one of those four.
Critics have argued that online venues may be more vulnerable to fraud, especially collusion between players. But security employees can look at hand history of the cards played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior much easier to detect than in a casino where it’s possible for a player to avoid detection by simply folding. Poker rooms also disallow players from sitting at the same table or in the same tournament if they are using an identical IP address.
In October 2004, Sportingbet, 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.
June 2005 saw PartyGaming, the parent company of the then largest online cardroom, go public on the London Stock Exchange, achieving an initial public offering market value in excess of $8 billion dollars. Ninety-two percent of PartyGaming’s income came from poker operations at the time of the IPO.
As of March 2008, there were less than forty stand-alone cardrooms and poker networks with real levels of traffic. There were more than 600 independed skins which group together and form the networks. As of January 2009 most online poker traffic occurs on just a few of the major networks and stand-alones, notable poker Stars net, Full Tilt Poker, and the iPoker network. Most of the high stakes action takes place on Full Tilt, all top ten winning players from 2008 were on their site.
More recently, there are a little over 500 online poker websites. 16 of those are stand-alone sites, the remaining are all skins and operate on 21 different networks, the largest of which is iPoker. Poker Stars net is the world’s largest online poker room, it has the highest number of players online at any one time.
Find out more about Poker Stars net and online poker in general at my website. Promotions, available games, and more at Poker Stars net.
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