The traditional venues for playing poker, brick and mortar casinos and poker rooms, can be intimidating for new players. And casinos have also been reluctant to make adequate room for card rooms up until recently, because of the lower profits from poker. Casinos would make much more money if they replaced poker rooms with slot machines or other traditional casino games.

By contrast, online venues are dramatically cheaper because of the smaller overhead costs. Adding more tables costs an online poker room nothing and takes up no valuable space, but makes dozens of players who can sit at those new tables happy. This is how the online venues can let players sit at tables with such low stakes, going all the way down to 1/2, and offer promotions like freeroll tournaments (meaning no entry fee).

Major online poker sites offer features to attract new players. A common feature is the offering of satellite tournaments, in which the winner will gain entry to real-life poker tournaments. Chris Moneymaker, who won the 2003 World Series of Poker, won entry into that tournament through a satellite. The following year saw three times as many entrants into the WSOP. Four of the players at the 2004 final table won their seats through online cardrooms, and the winner, Greg Raymer, was one of those four.

Critics have argued that online venues may be more vulnerable to fraud, especially collusion between players. But security employees can look at hand history of the cards played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior much easier to detect than in a casino where it’s possible for a player to avoid detection by simply folding. Poker rooms also disallow players from sitting at the same table or in the same tournament if they are using an identical IP address.

October 2004 saw Sportingbet, then the world’s largest publicly traded online gaming company, announce the acquisition of Paradise Poker, one of the online poker industry’s first and largest cardrooms. The sale was for $340 million dollars and marked the first time an online cardroom was owned by a public company. Several cardroom parent companies have gone public since then.

In June 2005, PartyGaming, the parent company of the then largest online poker site, went public on the London Stock Exchange. It achieved an initial public offering market value over $8 billion. At the time of the IPO, 92% of PartyGaming’s income came from poker operations.

In March 2008, there were less than forty cardrooms and poker networks with detectable levels of traffic. Hundreds of skins existed, in which different looking poker sites all shared networks in order to create busier poker rooms. As of early 2009 most online poker takes place at a few of the major networks and stand-alones, among them Poker Stars net, Full Tilt Poker, and the iPoker network. Full Tilt sees most of the high stakes play, with the top ten winning players of 2008 playing on their site.

As of February 2010, there are about 550 online poker websites. 16 of those are stand-alone and the rest are skins that operate on 21 different networks, the largest being iPoker. Poker Stars net is now the world’s most highly trafficked online poker room.

Learn more about Poker Stars net and online poker in general at my website. Promotions, available games, and more at Poker Stars net.