Traditional venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, can be intimidating for new players and are often located in geographically disparate locations. In the past, casinos have been reluctant to promote poker because it is less profitable for them than traditional casino games. Though the rake of traditional casinos is often high, the opportunity costs of running a poker room are even higher. Brick and mortar casinos often make much more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines.
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.
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.
As of March 2008, there are fewer than forty stand-alone cardrooms and poker networks with detectable levels of traffic. There are however more than 600 independent doorways or ‘skins’ into the group of network sites. As of January 2009, the majority of online poker traffic occurs on just a few major networks, among them PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the iPoker Network. The vast majority of high stakes action takes place on Full Tilt Poker, with the top ten winning players from 2008 all coming from this 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. Available games, promotions, and more at Poker Stars net.
Visit Rakeback Solution for the best Rakeback rates and Rakeback Promotions.