Online poker sites allow people to play poker against each other through the Internet. Online poker industry has been responsible for a drastic increase in the number of poker players in the world. For December 2003, online poker revenues were estimated at 34 million US dollars with a growth of 27 percent per month.
Traditional poker venues, also called Brick and Mortar or land based venues, such as poker rooms and casinos, frighten many novice players and can be accessed by limited amount of players because of their geographical location. For this reason, Brick and Mortar poker venues can not profit from massive promotional campaigns. The time charge, of these casinos and poker rooms is often very high, because of a lot of expenses required for maintenance of poker tables. Many casinos prefer to remove their poker areas and to use this floor space for additional slot machines that generate much higher income.
Online poker sites, by contrast, have much less expenses. They only need to pay their gaming license once a year, buy poker software, buy or rent a web server and employ a crew of 10-15 workers for customer support and technical maintenance of the site. Therefore they can lower their charges and still have a lot of money for promotional reasons. If an online poker room sees that it has enough visitors to add another table, it adds it immediately without spending precious floor space and money for the equipment. If it sees that there are too many tables, it can remove one even easier.
There are many features that are available only at online poker rooms. Players can see their banking and gaming history from the very first day they started to play at a certain online poker site. They can play at low-stake tables risking as much as 1 cent or even practice their skills at free-roll tables and tournaments. Most online poker rooms offer comprehensive rules and basic strategies for all poker games, so these sites are perfect for novice players.
Another great feature often offered at online poker sites is a possibility to win a seat at major real life poker tournaments that may cost thousands of dollars for those who want to buy it directly. A player who does not have serious ambitions will not spend this money, therefore only well known poker professionals took part in these tournaments. Nowadays, anyone who considers himself a poker player can try and qualify to these tournaments risking small money. In 2003, the winner of the most prestigious poker tournament World Series of Poker, Chris Moneymaker had won his entry to the tournament through a satellite at an online poker site. It caused a real shock in the whole poker world, and in 2004 a triple number of online poker players took part in World Series of Poker with 4 of them reaching the final table and another champion Greg Raymer, who took home 5 million dollars, the largest poker prize ever.
In October 2004, Sportingbet Plc acquired one of the largest poker rooms ParadisePoker.com and created the first online poker room owned by a public company. Since then, some other poker rooms have gone public such as Party Poker. In June 2005, Party Gaming, the parent company of PartyPoker.com, the largest online poker room, went public on the London Stock Exchange, with an initial market value over 8 billion dollars. At that moment, 92 percent of Party Gaming revenue came from PartyPoker.com.