Online Poker
Domino QQ What is Online Poker? Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It's been partially responsible for a massive increase in the number of poker players worldwide. Christiansen Capital Advisors said online poker earnings grew from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion in 2005, while a survey carried out by DrKW and Global Betting and Gaming Consultants asserted online poker revenues in 2004 were at $1.4 billion. In a testimony before the United States Senate regarding Internet Gambling, Grant Eve, a Certified Public Accountant representing that the US Enforcement Business Joseph Eve, Certified Public Accountants, estimated that one in every four dollars gambled is gambled online. Difference Between Conventional Poker and Online Poker Traditional (or "brick and mortar", B&M, live, land-based) venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, could be intimidating for novice players and are frequently found in geographically remote locations. Also, brick and mortar stores are reluctant to promote poker as it's hard for them to profit from it. Though the rake, or time charge, of traditional casinos is often large, 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 for instance, figures by the Gaming Accounting Firm Joseph Eve quote that poker accounts for 1% of brick and mortar casino earnings. Online venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper because they have much smaller overhead costs. By way of instance, adding another table does not take up valuable space as it would for a brick and mortar casino. Online poker rooms also allow the players to play low stakes (as low as 1pennies/2pennies) and frequently provide poker freeroll tournaments (where there isn't any entrance fee), attracting novices or less affluent clientele. Online venues may be more vulnerable to particular types of fraud, especially collusion between players. But they've collusion detection abilities that do not exist in brick and mortar casinos. For instance, online poker room security employees can examine the hand history of the cards previously played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior easier to detect than in a casino where colluding players can simply fold their hands without anybody ever knowing the strength of the holding. Internet poker rooms also assess players' IP addresses so as to prevent players at the same
household or at known open proxy servers from playing on the very same tables. Digital apparatus fingerprinting also allows poker sites to recognize and prevent players that make new accounts in attempts to circumvent prior account bans, restrictions and closures. History of Internet Poker Free poker online was performed as early as the late 1990s in the kind of IRC poker game. Planet Poker was the first online card room to offer real cash games from 1998. The first real money poker game has been dealt on January 1, 1998. Author Mike Caro became the "face" of Planet Poker at 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 which 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, and starting the poker boom. The 2004 World Series featured three times as many players as in 2003. At least four gamers in the WSOP final table won their entry through an online cardroom. Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg Raymer also won his entry at the PokerStars online cardroom. Four Ways online poker rooms gain Typically, internet poker rooms generate the bulk of their revenue through four methods. First, there is the rake. Like the vig paid to a bookie, the rake is a charge paid to the house for hosting the match. Rake is accumulated from most real money ring game pots. The rake is generally calculated as a proportion of the pot based on a sliding scale and capped at a maximum fee. Each online poker area decides its own rake structure. Since the expenses for conducting an online poker table are bigger than those for running a live poker table, rake in the majority of internet poker rooms is much smaller than its brick and mortar counterpart. Secondly, palms played in pre-scheduled multi-table and impromptu sit-and-go championships are not raked, but instead an entry fee around five to ten percent of the tournament buy is added to the entry price of this tournament. These two are usually specified at the tournament details as, e.g., $20+$2 ($20 signifies the buy-in which goes into the prize pool and $2 signifies the entrance fee, de facto rake). Unlike real casino tournaments, online tournaments do not deduct dealer tips and other costs in the prize pool. Third, some online poker websites also supply side games such as blackjack, roulettes , or unwanted stakes on poker hands in which the player plays "the home" for real cash. The chances are in your house's favor in these types of games, so producing a profit for your home. Some websites go so far as getting affiliated with internet casinos, or even integrating them into the poker room software. Fourth, like almost all institutions which hold cash, online poker sites invest the cash that gamers deposit. Regulations in most jurisdictions exist in a bid to limit the sort of risks sites can take together with their customers' cash. However, as the websites do not have to pay attention on players' bankrolls even low-risk investments can be a substantial source of earnings. QQ Poker