By Samantha Williams
Did you know that history was made when Chris Moneymaker, became the first online poker player to beat the odds at the 2003 WSOP final table and win $2.4 million. He started out with a bankroll of $39!
This is what online casino poker has done for the poker industry in general and now many players for website teams participate in large prize pot, land based tournaments. Chris Moneymaker was 28 years old when he achieved this feat from his online casino poker room – Poker Stars, and the amateur became a pro!
This is not the only time history has been made during this phenomenal era for online poker. At Full Tilt Poker, on the 17th November 2009 history was made again when the largest pot in an online game of heads-up Pot-limit Omaha ever, was won! This prize totaled $878,959 and the winner was Patrik Antonius, who was playing against “Isildur1” – obviously a fan of Lord of the Rings. However, just like Isildur lost the ring, so too did “Isildur1” lose the prize pot.
So you see playing casino poker online really can pay off big time if you know what you are doing in this game of skill and strategy where nerves of steel are a plus.
The game of poker has a reputation for being favored by cowboys in the Wild, Wild West, and has been played for more than 200 years. People believed this game to be a bad game which only people with bad reputations played, when it is really a thinking man’s game where good reputations are made.
The phenomenal growth in the popularity of playing poker world-wide has definitely been inspired by the fact that online casino poker rooms were made available. The first of these was proto-typed by Microgaming in 1994 and was actually a casino, the rest as they say, “is history”.
Other online gambling operations were in existence before poker became available online, and yet none of these facilities – which were mostly sports books, and casinos had the same impact on the gambling world.
Planet Poker was the first established online poker specific room and it was launched in 1998. This site is still active today, and in comparison to some of the big names, it is a relatively small site. This is actually surprising because they did for a time enjoy the status of being the “sole” online poker room on the net.
They introduced a rake structure of 5% up to $3 maximum rake and this structure is still used as a benchmark in the industry. Even though a great many things have changed hugely since 1998, this rake structure is still widely used.
Paradise Poker entered the fray in 1999, then in 2000 came Poker Spot. Party Poker and Poker Stars came online in 2001, and now in 2010, there are 545 sites, with 16 standalones and the majority of these sites are networked. This game has grown exponentially!!
