Online Poker
Domino Qiu Qiu What is Online Poker? Internet poker is your game of poker played on the Internet. It's been partly responsible for a huge gain in the number of poker players worldwide. Christiansen Capital Advisors said online poker revenues 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 earnings 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 the US Enforcement Business Joseph Eve, Certified Public Accountants, estimated that one in every four dollars gambled is gambled online. Difference Between Traditional Poker and Online Poker Traditional (or "brick and mortar", B&M, live, land-based) venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, may be intimidating for novice players and are frequently located in geographically disparate locations. Additionally, brick and mortar casinos are somewhat hesitant to promote poker because it is difficult for them to profit from it. Though the rake, or time charge, of traditional casinos is usually large, the opportunity costs of running a poker room are even greater. Brick and mortar casinos often make much more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines - for instance, figures by the Gaming Enforcement Firm Joseph Eve estimate that poker accounts for 1 percent of brick and mortar casino earnings. Online venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper because they have much smaller overhead costs. For example, adding another table doesn't take up valuable space like it would for a physical casino. Online poker rooms also permit the players to play low stakes (as low as 1pennies/2cents) and often provide poker freeroll tournaments (in which there is no entry fee), attracting novices or less wealthy clientele. Online venues may be more vulnerable to particular types of fraud, especially collusion between players. However, they have collusion detection abilities that don't exist in brick and mortar casinos. For instance, internet 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 their holding. Online poker rooms also check players' IP addresses so as to prevent players in the same household or at known open proxy servers from playing the same tables. Digital apparatus fingerprinting also allows poker websites to recognize and block players who create new accounts in efforts to bypass prior account bans, limitations and closures.
History of Internet Poker Free poker online has been performed as early as the late 1990s in the kind of IRC poker. Planet Poker was the first online card room to provide real cash games from 1998. The initial real money poker match was dealt on January 1, 1998. Writer Mike Caro became the "face" of Planet Poker at October 1999. The significant internet 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 moved on to win the main event, causing shock in the poker world, and beginning the poker boom. 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 Raymer also won his entry at the PokerStars online cardroom. Four Ways online poker rooms profit Normally, internet poker rooms create the bulk of their earnings through four methods. First, there is the rake. Like the vig paid into a bookie, the rake is a fee paid to the home for hosting the game. Rake is accumulated from most real money ring game pots. The rake is normally calculated as a proportion of the pot based on a sliding scale and capped at a maximum fee. Each online poker area determines its rake structure. Considering that the expenses for running an online poker table are bigger than those for conducting a live poker table, rake in the majority of internet poker rooms is much more compact compared to its brick and mortar counterpart. Secondly, hands played in pre-scheduled multi-table and impromptu sit-and-go tournaments are not raked, but rather an entry fee around five to ten percent of the championship buy is added to the entry cost of this tournament. These two are generally specified at the championship particulars as, e.g., $20+$2 ($20 represents the buy-in that goes into the prize pool and $2 signifies the entry fee, de facto rake). Unlike actual casino tournaments, online tournaments don't deduct dealer tips and other expenses from the prize pool. Third, a few online poker websites also offer side games like blackjack, roulettes side stakes on poker hands in which the player plays against "the house" for real money. The odds are in the house's favor in these games, so producing a profit for the home. Some websites go so far as getting affiliated with online casinos, or perhaps incorporating them into the poker room software. Fourth, like almost all institutions which hold money, online poker websites invest the cash that players deposit. Regulations in many jurisdictions exist in a bid to limit the sort of risks sites can take with their customers' cash. But as the websites don't need to pay attention on gamers' bankrolls even low-risk investments can be a substantial source of earnings. Domino Qiu Qiu