The Poker Source

Posts Tagged ‘poker stars net’

Traditional venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, can be intimidating for new players and are often located in geographically disparate locations. In the past, casinos have been reluctant to promote poker because it is less profitable for them than traditional casino games. Though the rake of traditional casinos is often high, the opportunity costs of running a poker room are even higher. Brick and mortar casinos often make much more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines.

Online poker rooms don’t face anywhere near the same cost issues that casinos do. It costs nothing for an online venue to add more tables and no valuable space is taken up by adding lower stakes games. Promotions like freeroll tournaments are common and the stakes can go as low as 1/2.

Online venues may be more vulnerable to certain types of fraud, especially collusion between players. However, they have collusion detection abilities that do not exist in brick and mortar casinos. For example, online poker room security employees can look at the hand history of the cards previously played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior easier to detect than in a casino where colluding players can simply fold their hands without anyone ever knowing the strength of their hole cards. Online poker rooms also check players’ IP addresses in order to prevent players at the same household or at known open proxy servers from playing on the same tables.

The major online poker sites offer varying features to entice new players. One common feature is to offer tournaments called satellites by which the winners gain entry to real-life poker tournaments. It was through one such tournament on Poker Stars net that Chris Moneymaker won his entry to the 2003 World Series of Poker. He went on to win the main event, shocking the poker world. The 2004 World Series featured three times as many players as in 2003. At least four players in the WSOP final table won their entry through an online cardroom. Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg Raymer also won his entry at the Poker Stars online cardroom.

In October 2004, Sportingbet, then the world’s largest publicly traded online gaming company, announced the acquisition of Paradise Poker, one of the online poker industry’s first and largest cardrooms. The sale went through for $340 million and marked the first time an online poker site was owned by a public company. Since then, several cardroom parent companies have gone public.

In June 2005, PartyGaming, the parent company of the then largest online cardroom, PartyPoker, went public on the London Stock Exchange, achieving an initial public offering market value in excess of $8 billion dollars. At the time of the IPO, ninety-two percent of Party Gaming’s income came from poker operations.

As of March 2008, there are fewer than forty stand-alone cardrooms and poker networks with detectable levels of traffic. There are however more than 600 independent doorways or ‘skins’ into the group of network sites. As of January 2009, the majority of online poker traffic occurs on just a few major networks, among them PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the iPoker Network. The vast majority of high stakes action takes place on Full Tilt Poker, with the top ten winning players from 2008 all coming from this site.

As of February 2010, there are approximately 545 online poker websites. Within the 545 active sites, 16 are stand-alone sites, the remaining 529 sites are called “skins” and operate on 21 different shared networks, the largest network being iPoker which has 68 skins operating on its network. Of all the online poker rooms Poker Stars net is the world’s largest poker site judged by the number of players online at any one time.

Want to read more about online poker and Poker Stars net specifically? Then click this link to visit my website about Poker Stars net.

Please visit Rakeback Solution for all of your Rakeback needs.