A Brief History of Online Poker
When most people first heard of online poker rooms most of us did not even flutter an eyelid as it just seemed to be another gimmick to make us part with our money but as the future soon became clear this was certainly not the case as what happened next in the online world could not have been predicted by anyone.
Online poker began in the year of 1998 but it was not until 2002 that the craze of online poker really took off. There were a few online poker rooms around in 1998 and the very first was Planet Poker. There were more and more poker rooms appearing over the internet every year but it was not until 2002 that the larger and well known poker sites came into play and these included the Party Poker and Poker Stars online websites. When poker was first shown on television for the first time in the United States in 2003 it was the beginning of the online poker explosion which soon became a national game. The televised events of the poker world tour were first shown on the travel channel in 2003 and this soon became the highest TV ratings show on the network ever. Other networks such as ESPN also granted the game a lot of air time and in 2003 almost eight hundred people took part in the No limit Texas Hold Em tournament main event of the World Poker Series and this was the largest amount of players to ever enter this tournament and became a new record. However just to grasp the effect that 2003 had on poker this record did not stand for long as in 2004 that number of eight hundred players soon more than tripled than the previous year and this was when online poker became a online world sport. The 2004 tournament had a prize of five million dollars and due to the interest in online poker playing it was concluded that almost half of the two thousand six hundred players had actually qualified by playing over the internet.
As you would expect in 2005 the record for the amount of players who took part was destroyed again as there were nearly six thousand players who entered into the World Series and in the previous two years the winner of the main event were both players who had played online at the Poker Stars website.
Today the online poker community is driven by the US and they have turned the industry from nothing to a two billion a year industry thanks largely to Party Poker who hold almost a half of the whole online poker industry today. What I can see though is that the online poker has already produced world champions of the game and probably will do for years to come and with so many of the games professionals leaning towards the online community as well there is no doubt in my mind that online poker has a very bright future.