Traditionally, the venues for playing live poker, casinos and poker rooms, have been intimidating for novice players. Up until the last few years, casinos have been reluctant to make space for a card room because they make so much more money from the usual casino games. It would be more profitable for casinos to remove poker rooms and add more slot machines.
Online poker rooms don't face anywhere near the same cost issues that casinos do. It costs nothing for an online venue to add more tables and no valuable space is taken up by adding lower stakes games. Promotions like freeroll tournaments are common and the stakes can go as low as 1/2.
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.
October 2004 saw Sportingbet, then the world's largest publicly traded online gaming company, announce the acquisition of Paradise Poker, one of the online poker industry's first and largest cardrooms. The sale was for $340 million dollars and marked the first time an online cardroom was owned by a public company. Several cardroom parent companies have gone public since then.
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.
As of February 2010, there are approximately 545 online poker websites. Within the 545 active sites, 16 are stand-alone sites, the remaining 529 sites are called "skins" and operate on 21 different shared networks, the largest network being iPoker which has 68 skins operating on its network. Of all the online poker rooms Poker Stars net is the world's largest poker site judged by the number of players online at any one time.
Online poker rooms don't face anywhere near the same cost issues that casinos do. It costs nothing for an online venue to add more tables and no valuable space is taken up by adding lower stakes games. Promotions like freeroll tournaments are common and the stakes can go as low as 1/2.
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.
October 2004 saw Sportingbet, then the world's largest publicly traded online gaming company, announce the acquisition of Paradise Poker, one of the online poker industry's first and largest cardrooms. The sale was for $340 million dollars and marked the first time an online cardroom was owned by a public company. Several cardroom parent companies have gone public since then.
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.
As of February 2010, there are approximately 545 online poker websites. Within the 545 active sites, 16 are stand-alone sites, the remaining 529 sites are called "skins" and operate on 21 different shared networks, the largest network being iPoker which has 68 skins operating on its network. Of all the online poker rooms Poker Stars net is the world's largest poker site judged by the number of players online at any one time.
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