When Did Online Poker Start
In August 1997, Planet Poker opened, offering 'play money' games. In January of 1998, they began offering the first ever live cash games against human oponents in history. Not long after the launch of Planet Poker many more online cardrooms began springing up, including ParadisePoker.com, which quickly became the leader in online poker.
You can read the first part of the online poker history by going to The History of online poker. The Stone Age (1995-1998).
- Not long after opening his account with Full Tilt Poker, Dwan won $200,000 in less than an hour after joining six different $100/$200 NLHE tables at the same time, and it didn’t take him long to start playing against the most established online poker players in the world, including Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and Viktor “Isildur1” Blom.
- People started taking online poker sites more seriously in 2003 when an amateur poker player named Chris Moneymaker qualified for the World Series of Poker Main Event through a $40 tournament online. Moneymaker ended up taking home $2.5 million for winning the tournament and he single-handedly revolutionized the game.
As you know, success in any sphere is achieved by pioneers and founders, who reap the rewards and write their names in the history with Golden. However, they have to fight for this right with its direct competitors, who rush to the victim like hungry wolves, once they smell prey. The prey was Planet Poker. In the early 2000s, other poker rooms began to gain from the difficulties experienced by Planet Poker, and copied things or offered something new. Paradise Poker achieved the greatest success.
Paradise Poker hit the jackpot when started to cooperate with a young developing company ith the modest name of Google. Anyone who searched for the word 'poker' immediately hit on the Paradise Poker website. Now Google doesn’t make ads of gambling, but Paradise Poker was at the right time and in the right place.
In 2000, the world saw the launch of PokerSpot room, founded by Dutch Boyd. Frankly speaking, this person is not very popular with the today’s generation of players, but it doesn’t make him less significant. Dutch is a holder of two WSOP bracelets, and the World Series winner with a total winnings of $1,404,987. Moreover, Boyd can be called the first online poker grinder.
If you remember, in the first part of the history of online poker we told that players who managed to earn a million of play money chips could exchange them for real $100. Dutch did it more than once and repeatedly tricked a free hundred out gullible poker sites. Among other things, Boyd enjoyed immense respect in poker community but up to a point.
At first, everything was going well for Dutch: he established his own poker room, and called it PokerSpot. Admittedly, Dutch Boyd was ahead of his time to some extent but no one appreciated it. The fault of Boyd is that he gave birth to the idea, but forgot get it into shape. PokerSpot was the first online poker room to offer multi-table tournaments - this was a kind of revolution by Dutch Boyd. However, at that time the popularity of the limit hold'em was so immense that many didn’t care about these monotonous tournaments.
Dutch Boyd invested $80,000, collected from friends and relatives, but he didn’t manage to promote his brainchild. PokerSpot game client threw out error messages, auto-closed, and lived its life. It was a problem to contact the support service. Given a severe lack of poker rooms, people were ready to put up with it until the last drop.
The biggest problems began with the processing of financial transactions. Users complained that it took months to get money. Even when the money was received, banks refused to cash out referring to 'insufficient funds on the account'.
To the credit of Boyd, he did not hide from the clients and was willing to communicate with each of them on 2+2 forum. Boyd was incanting about some technical problems, which were fully solvable, but required some time. He told different in private conversations: that the site experienced problems with processing credit cards and that he got money with a big delay.
In fact, people had to wait a long time. Some are waiting to this day. According to unofficial data, users lost about $400,000 on the way between the room and credit cards.
The number of withdrawal requests was growing. By the summer of 2001, it became clear that the poker room was doomed. Poker room gave up after a year of such billing convulsions, and Boyd went from a once authoritative community member into a pariah.
Most of money was forever lost. After that, the name of Dutch Boyd was covered in the poker news, but it was like an agony: he could not arrange a deal with backers, then he was selling the WSOP bracelet on eBay, then he was just looking for usual 'human' job.
Now let’s back to Paradise Poker, which survives as a subscription-based online poker site, and moves around from network to network (now it is a part of Sportingbet company). The Paradise Poker management was prompt and quick to learn from mistakes, so there were no sappy stories about the RNG integrity and Bible-oath. They ensured a high-quality work on the application that seemed a manna from heaven compared to PokerSpot. In fairness, we must admit that the high-quality work of the poker room was pathed by their direct competitor, PlanetPoker, who ploughed through the minefield by trial and error.
The current generation knows little about Paradise Poker. They only could learn about this brand in co-operation with the famous bookmaker Sportingbet, which purchased Paradise Poker in October 2004, but that's another story.
Strategic management was the only thing that Paradise Poker had. At least, at the initial stage. At the beginning of 2000’s poker rooms did not care about their complaint due to search engines and the Internet at hand, which were not such a powerful and popular method of promotion in those days. But it was Paradise Poker which became the pioneer. It promptly swept in and became monopolist in the market of online advertising in the poker segment. It's hard to say, but the mistakes of Planet Poker have predetermined the outcome of the bout between these two sharks of 2000s. However, Paradise Poker had an extra point.
Paradise Poker improved their software and worked on security. This was the first poker room, which developed statistics - the average size of the banks at the table and the number of players during the flop. In addition, it was the first website to offer two-table playing.
It was inappropriate to talk on the decline of PlanetPoker too soon at that time. With Paradise Poker, they have been the largest online poker rooms in the online poker market. Their positions can be compared with PokerStars and Full Tilt a few years before the 'Black Friday'. PlanetPoker managed to rank its competitors, and responded by the launch of the most expensive table of that time - $20/$40 LHE. If you forgot, we will recall that multi-tabling did not exist in 2000s. There was a 'one table per limit' principle. Given the level of popularity, players literally made a one-kilometer line while waiting for a table (as a rule, the most expensive one). In the future, both competitors tried not to leave any attack of the opponent without some response.
It did not last long. Planet Poker operated on the market until 2007, but since 2001, nobody took it seriously. It was already 2001, which became the beginning of the new era. The era, which produced such familiar (and to some extent notorious) brands as PokerStars, PartyPoker and Ultimate Bet.
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The game of poker may go back as far as 200 years, but the online version as we know it today is only a mere 13 years old. The first virtual poker hand was dealt over the Internet on January 1, 1998 when the very first online poker site was launched, Planet Poker. Planet Poker was founded by poker pro, author, and legend, Mike “Mad Genius” Caro and is still in existence today, though it quit taking real money bets in March 2007 following the UIGEA fiasco (more on that later). The first real-money poker game was a Texas Hold ‘em game of $3/$6 stakes. Although Planet Poker was the first online poker room, it failed to tap into the crowds of players waiting to be summoned.
Interestingly enough, as unexciting as the history of Planet Poker is, the initial rake rate set by that very first online poker room is still the industry norm today at about 5% rake or max $3 rake cap.
Later in the year, a Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona introduces the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act (IGPA), so that before online gambling had even really gotten started, there were already lawmakers trying to knock it down. If passed, the IGPA would make it illegal for websites to offer online gambling services to US citizens. It fails to pass.
By the end of 1998, the online gambling business has generated $834.5 million in revenue despite connectivity issues, slow servers, and primitive network technology, as reported by Frost and Sullivan, global market research firm.
In 1999 three unnamed Canadians launch Paradise Poker out of Costa Rica, and it has much better success than Planet Poker and becomes the industry leader. In addition to Texas Hold ‘em, they offer Seven Card Stud and Omaha. They also provide improved software, security, and overall customer service.
In May 2000, Poker Spot launches by successful poker professional, Dutch Boyd. In September of 2000, Poker Spot is the first online poker site to offer online poker tournaments. Unfortunately, Poker Spot would be the first of many online poker horror stories as the sport struggled to form an orderly path to success despite its exponential and compounding growth. Boyd claims that the credit card processing firm that he used to process player deposits was not able to collect deposits, and there was no money in the system. Winners are not paid, and the room is out of business by November 2001. The emergence of e-wallets and e-cash payment processors like NETeller eradicates the problem that brought Poker Spot down.
UltimateBet launches in 2000 with some silent partners who turn out to be some high-stake players, and no-limit hold’em is offered. The average pot size is displayed in the software lobby for the first time. Russ Hamilton is hired to promote the site. His player sponsorship model that is still used today brought on 11-time WSOP winner, Phil “The Poker Brat” Hellmuth.
In 2001, Party Poker and PokerStars start up. Along with Paradise Poker, these three online poker sites are very successful and feature proprietary software that make their games better and easily accessible to dial-up and early broadband Internet users.
Throughout 2001, Paradise Poker remains in the front line of the industry, but PartyPoker has begun offering tournaments, and that summer, they host a series of tourneys that finish up on a cruise ship, now known as the PartyPoker Million cruise. The promotional-style strategy they adopt is a very successful business model and pays off with financial success.
By 2002 the momentum is gaining for online poker. Paradise Poker begins to lose ground, as they are still not offering mutli-table tournaments. Also, the travel channel televises the World Poker Tour. PartyPoker jumps at the opportunity to advertise and they see a huge influx of new players as a result. As if over night, PartyPoker becomes the world’s largest online poker site, successfully capturing a global market. It will remain the biggest Internet poker provider until 2006.
When Does Online Poker Start In Pa
In 2003, Chris Moneymaker qualifies for a seat at the World Series of Poker Main Event and wins the tournament, turning a $40 investment in a qualifier tournament into a $2.5 million payout. This instantly catapults PokerStars into the running for biggest online poker site with average Joes everywhere signing up with the site hoping to be the next Moneymaker. Moneymaker inspired millions and as if over night, again, the online poker community swells. PokerStars takes in more players than all other sites combined.
By 2004 PartyPoker is making more than $1 million in profit daily. Online poker is growing faster than anyone could have fathomed. Mainstream America is seeing poker on television and more players are signing up. More and more new online poker sites are popping up on a daily basis. Full Tilt Poker emerges with heavy advertising campaigns on television and top poker pro spokesmen. Full Tilt instantly becomes one of the big guns in online poker.
In 2004, search engines Yahoo and Google remove all Internet gambling advertising from after the US Justice Department announces that advertising for such activity may be interpreted as aiding and abetting illegal gambling in the Wire Wager Act of 1961.
The US makes up more than 51% of the $8.5 billion in revenue generate by online gambling, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors, industry researchers. In 2005, an estimated 55 million Americans participate in online poker, 15 million of those playing with real money, according to the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), a newly founded grass roots advocacy group formed to combat the fight against online poker in the US. This year, PartyGaming lists on the London Stock exchange with a market value of around £4.6 billion.
Furthermore, Antigua Barbuda, Caribbean island nation and one of the top established Internet gambling hubs in the world, files action to the World Trade Organization against the US government suggesting that US anti-Internet gambling laws (as interpreted from the Wire Wager Act) are in violation of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services. The WTO rules in favor of Antigua Barbuda.
In 2006, just when everything is going great for global and US online poker markets, the US Senate under the Bush Administration attaches the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) to the Safe Ports Act, which passes, rendering it illegal for US banks to process online gambling payments for US residents. Overnight, the industry is shaken. PartyPoker bans US players from participating in real money poker games on its site, as do a number of other online poker websites. Other Internet poker sites, however, opt to ignore the UIGEA.
Barney Frank, Democrat US Congressman, attempts to pass legislation that will overturn the UIGEA, and the PPA takes a stand for the millions of US players who have been locked out of their accounts.
By 2007, NETeller, one of the biggest online payment processors for online gambling related transactions shuts its doors to US players when co-founders Stephen Lawrence and John Lefebvre are charged with money laundering and arrested in Manhattan, making the threat of the UIGEA all the more real for payment processors. Many other e-cash servicers also pull out over the following years.
Despite this though, online poker rooms continue to welcome new US real money player signups. Deposits and cash outs are masked by labels that hide their ties to online gambling.
Online casinos are also becoming more and more popular, with their success developing just as quickly as that of online poker. Many accept US players, many do not, as they face the same money processing issues.
In 2007, a story breaks that Absolute Poker players may have been the victim of a superuser account that was able to see its opponents’ hole cards. The online poker community is taken aback.
The fight for legalized online poker is gaining ground. In 2008, Barney Frank continues to try and overturn the UIGEA. A 32-32 vote needs one more vote to pass and doesn’t make it through, but the future seems bright for online poker with a new administration taking office. Texas Republican Congressman, Ron Paul uses repeal of the UIGEA in his presidential campaign.
In 2008, another superuser account scandal breaks out, this time with Absolute Poker’s sister site, UltimateBet.com. Via an in-depth investigation by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission and player analyses that were ignited by player allegations, Ultimate Bet is in the middle of a whirlwind of accusations that security of software has been compromised and once again some players were in fact able to play at these sites with the knowledge of other players’ hole cards. Between the years of 2005 and 2007, millions of dollars of unsuspecting players’ money is taken by superuser cheaters and goes unrecovered.
Also in 2008, South Africa and Italy join the long list of nations that have introduced legislation to regulate and endorse Internet gambling legally in their countries.
At the end of 2008, Anurag Dikshit, founder of PartyGaming, pleads guilty to illegal online gambling and is sentenced to pay $300 million in fines and faces up to two years in jail for violating the Wire Act.
By 2009, there is still no headway in the US for regulated online poker, despite the global trend for it. Congressman Jared Polis says, “The nail in the UIGEA coffin is the fact that the law doesn’t prevent Americans spending over $100 billion every year on foreign gambling sites.” The US ultimately loses this annual revenue that could otherwise be kept on US soil and benefit the still staggering economy.
April 15, 2011 becomes forever known in the poker world as “Black Friday.” The federal US government seizes the domains of the three biggest online poker sites services the US market, Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker, and PokerStars based on illegal transactions that were verified by Daniel Tzvetkoff. Only one of these would survive the year. A number of indictments are also handed down to founding members and executives responsible for these online poker rooms.
May 23, 2011, just five weeks after Black Friday, the US poker market is hit again. This time, it’s called “Blue Monday,” and 10 more online poker sites are shut down, this time by the Department of Homeland Security. An investigation uncovered an estimated 300,000 financial transactions were being processed via Linwood Payment Solutions connected with illegal gambling.
PokerStars survives the attack by US officials and begins repaying players. Absolute Poker closes. Full Tilt Poker players still await more than $150 million in payments that simply doesn’t exist. Accused of operating a Ponzi scheme, the Full Tilt Poker brand faces the worst publicity an online poker room could endure. Groupe Bernard Tapie works out a deal with the US DOJ and the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) to retain licensing for the room and takeover agreements are still in the works.
By the end of 2011, online poker in the US is pretty much eradicated, and the future of regulation looms uncertain overhead. Will online poker ever be legalized in the US? Many hope so, but the question is when? With any luck, it could be in the next few years, as there is a very strong following behind the cause both in the public sector and the political base. The truth is that there are so many other issues facing Congress, Internet poker often gets shifted to the back burner when it comes down to business, but in reality it’s the billions of dollars that could stimulate the US economy, as well as the lost tax revenue that is a shame. US citizens are the real losers here.
When Did Online Poker Start
Time Line
January 1, 1998 – Planet Poker launches and deals the first real money poker hand online.
1998 – Arizona senator Jon Kyl introduces the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act (IGPA) to attempt to prohibit websites from taking bets from US citizens. It does not pass.
1998 year end – online gambling as a whole generates $834.5 million in revenue in 1998 alone.
1999 – Paradise Poker launches.
May 2000 – Poker pro Dutch Boyd opens Poker Spot and offers first online poker tournaments. Poker Spot becomes the first online poker site to not pay players. By then end of 2001 they close.
2000 – UltimateBet launches.
2001 – PartyPoker and PokerStars launch.
2002 – PartyPoker emerges as the biggest online poker site thanks to promotions and WPT televised advertising.
2003 – Chris Moneymaker wins the WSOP Main Event by qualifying online at PokerStars catapulting PokerStar signups.
2004 – Online poker continues to grow exponentially. Yahoo and Google remove online gambling advertisements from their sites.
2005 – PartyPoker lists on the London Stock Exchange, one of the first Internet gambling companies to go public.
An estimated 15 million real money poker players exist in the US and 51% of the $8.5 billion online gambling industry is from US players.
The Poker Players Alliance forms.
2006 – The UIGEA is passed and immediately PokerStars withdraws from the US market.
2007 – Superuser account scandal breaks regarding Absolute Poker.
2008 – Another Superuser account scandal breaks out, this time involving Ultimate Bet.
June 1, 2010 – The UIGEA officially goes into effect.
When Did Online Poker Start
April 15, 2011 – Online poker’s Black Friday: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker domains are seized by the US feds, along with players’ funds; player accounts are frozen. Only PokerStars survives the year.
May 23, 2011 – Online poker’s Blue Monday: 10 more US-friendly poker sites are shut down.
2011 end – A takeover of Full Tilt Poker by Groupe Bernard Tapie is still in the works. Players have yet to be paid the estimated $150 million in owed funds. PokerStars deals its 70 billionth hand without the help of US players.