When the aptly named amateur Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker’s Main Event in 2003, pocketing a cool $2.5 million in the process, web poker traffic shot through the roof.
Here was a 27-year-old accountant scooping the greatest prize in poker after qualifying for the tournament via a $39 online satellite. It was online poker’s watershed moment.
The ‘Moneymaker effect’, as it was dubbed, was the catalyst for new players logging on in their droves for a chance to become overnight millionaires. ‘If it can happen to him then it can happen to me’, was the mentality of aspiring players with dollar signs flashing before their eyes.
Although Moneymaker’s win put online poker in the spotlight, the game had existed on the net since the nineties.
Shuffle up and deal
In 1997, some forward-thinking geeks married their affection for poker with their computing prowess to create a crude form of game on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Forget flashy 3D graphics. Forget run-of-the-mill 2D graphics. This was the epitome of basic.
Players played with imaginary money and used IRC to communicate with one another and the dealer. Despite its limitations, it was a pretty groundbreaking development, piquing the interest of would-be poker site operators.
Then on January 1, 1998, Planet Poker became the first site to offer real money games by credit card deposits, heralding a new era in online gambling, albeit hampered by sluggish and unreliable 56k dial-up connections.
By 2001, Paradise Poker was bossing the market (Planet Poker fell by the wayside) thanks to its aggressive advertising campaign and burgeoning customer base.
But Paradise Poker’s hand soon turned into a busted flush as the likes of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and PartyPoker began to dominate the market with their potentially life-changing tournament cash payouts.
PartyPoker was the first to offer a $1 million guaranteed prize pool for an online tournament. The fact that players could compete on their home PCs for meaty prize pools for only a modest outlay was a major USP.
Full house
Poker’s boom didn’t go unnoticed and soon almost every sports betting company was offering and promoting the game. By the mid-noughties, everyone wanted a piece of the online poker pie as player numbers snowballed – sometimes hundreds of thousands of people would be playing during peak periods.
Sites were soon sponsoring successful players to be ambassadors and attract new business. The elite have become superstars in their own rights and even household names. They travel the world playing in televised poker tournaments, stay in luxury hotels and have kissed the nine-to-five rat race goodbye.
The online card rooms are where you will find these players plying their trade, some at nosebleed stakes. And as the stakes ballooned, so did the pots on the virtual baize.
In 2009, the Finnish pro Patrik Antonius tangled with Swedish poker starlet Viktor Blom, which led to the biggest single pot in online poker history – an eye-watering $1,356,947 to be precise.
However, while the pots have grown, so has the standard of play.
Five or six years ago, the sites were chock-a-block with weak players but, unfortunately, many of these have vanished or been devoured by the bloodthirsty card sharks who studied the game.
The US
When you look at the history of online poker, there's been one other theme. The US government has never been comfortable with online gambling.
Things reached their inevitable conclusion in April 2011 when the government shut down the three big poker sites in the US. Unfortunately, players with the Full Tilt site also lost any money they had in their accounts with the site. At the time of writing, they still haven't got their money back.
However, on the plus side, many observers expect that the US government will eventually legalise online poker and the game is also growing fast in new markets in Asia, South American and Eastern Europe. What's more, there are fresh players coming through and close to 600 recognised poker sites in the world. There's plenty of money to play for!
In our next article, we're going to look at Playing poker for free.
