Internet Poker

There’s no doubt that one of the fastest growing business’s, on the Internet, over the past few years has been one involving poker.

Where, in 1999, you’d have been lucky to find a couple of early pioneers of the industry (Planet Poker & Paradise Poker spring to mind) plying their trade, in today’s cyberworld there are in excess of 200 online poker rooms each attempting to grab an audience and keep it.

The most popular Internet site today has in excess of 100,000 players on site at certain times of the day and if you consider that even if half of the ones playing are generating some sort of income for the company running it at any given moment then you can see just what a cash generating venture they has become.

Of course not everyone is big! The smaller sites are all competing for your money just as much as the big guys but as with anything in life the bigger you are the more power you can excerpt over your target audience and success breeds success.

There have been several catastrophes along the way where the sites have shut up over night and lost thousands of clients thousands of dollars but generally the industry has been stable even if it has meant for some cut-throat offers in order to stay in the game and keep up the pressures on their competitors.

There’s no doubt that people do enjoy playing poker without the problems associated with playing ‘live’. Knowing that its 4am and their bed is 10 feet away from the computer inspires even the most meekest players to play well into the night in their slippers and dressing gown knowing that sleep awaits them within 30 seconds of the game ending. Not like in a card room where once you’ve lost all your money you have an hour’s drive home to dwell on your losses!

There’s nothing worse than finishing one out of the prize money at your local club and then finding that someone has ‘accidentally’ scraped along the side of your car in the car park thereby giving you another bill to worry about the next morning.

Internet poker means no niceties, no problem with other people’s mannerisms, and no problem with dodgy dealing and an age in getting paid out. No siree! You win the tournament and the money is there, in your account, ready for you to immediately blow in a wild game of OMAHA. (another card game popular in the clubs and casinos and one we’ll take a brief look at later on)

In an age of convenience its right that you should come home from work, switch on your computer (broadband of course) and be just seconds away from playing the game you love so much. This, my friend, is Internet poker and to hell with the rest of the world and all its other problems.

In the beginning, when Internet poker was in its infancy, a number of club owners feared that their base of players would evaporate as more and more players played at home. That didn’t happen. What DID happen was that people who had never tried the game before suddenly found comfort and a sense of excitement at being able to play the game with total strangers on a wet and windy night the world over. From there they ventured into the card rooms, for the first time, and stayed.

TV helped a great deal. When an Internet card room advertised its website during the World Poker Tour shows, in the USA, subscriptions went up four-fold in a matter of weeks.

From a base of zero then we now have over 2 million players playing for either money or pleasure on any given Internet card room on any given night of the week.

Of course Internet poker is like most things on the Internet in that it’s mostly run in unregulated environments (Indian Tribal lands). The biggest names in the game all operate from these small patches of land where, if anything should go wrong, customers are liable to lose many thousands of pounds overnight.

The UK’s bookmakers (Ladbrokes / Betfair / Coral / William Hill) have all created card rooms, in which to play and gives the customers a sense of trust that maybe not as easily found on the smaller sites. Having said that though you’ll be hard pressed to find the servers on which they run the games based on UK soil because of uncertainties in the law. Gibraltar is a favoured place as is the Dutch Antilles and Antigua. In 2007 the gaming laws will change to allow these sites to be located on UK soil however with a proposed tax rate of 15% (as in Gordon Brown 2007 budget) there won’t be any mad rush!

Like any new industry or revolution the game, its customers, and the people behind the businesses that run the games continue to evolve. In the beginning there are always failures and there are always successes. In late 2004 Sportingbet bought out Paradise Poker, one of the first websites to offer poker, for an enormous sum of money. This site was recently closed. Why? Prohibition!!

Back in 2006 when the land of the free was, well pretty much the land of the free, Jim Leach a republican from Iowa introduced a bill that would effectively BAN Internet gambling (including poker) in the USA. Now of course banning something that runs on the Internet can be tricky at the best of times so he set about the task by sneaking the bill into some ‘must sign into law’ package that involved port security.

Needless to say the bill sailed through congress and suddenly it was illegal to gamble (play poker) online.

As I write this the various forms of transferring funds between the player and the online poker sites has been curtailed somewhat and the US Government are making life as difficult as possible for US players to engage in what is a fairly harmless activity.

Over in Europe though the sites are kicking. The increase in players continues to escalate and life is good.

See you at the tables.

Next week’s article is about Playing the Game