play poker online

Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It has been partly responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of poker players worldwide. In 2005, revenues from online poker were estimated at US$ 200 million per month.[1]
Contents [hide]1 Overview 2 Legality 3 How online poker rooms profit 4 Integrity and fairness 5 Differences compared to conventional poker 6 Bonuses 7 Compatibility 8 Online poker portals and forums 9 See also 10 Notes 11 External links
OverviewTraditional (or "brick and mortar", B&M, live) venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, may be intimidating for novice players and are often located in geographically disparate locations. Also, brick and mortar casinos are reluctant to promote poker because it is difficult for them to profit from it. Though the rake, or time charge, 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 venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper because they have much smaller overhead costs. For example, adding another table does not take up valuable space like it would for a brick and mortar casino. Online poker rooms also allow the players to play for low stakes (as low as 1¢) and often offer poker freeroll tournaments (where there is no entry fee), attracting beginners.
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 holding. 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.
Free poker online was played as early as the late 1990s in the form of IRC poker. Shortly thereafter Planet Poker was the first online cardroom to offer real money games. Author Mike Caro was one of the founders and the "face" of Planet Poker.
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 PokerStars that Chris Moneymaker won his entry to the 2003 World Series of Poker. He went on to win the main event causing shock in the poker world. The 2004 World Series featured three times as many players than in 2003. At least four players in the WSOP final table won their entry through an online cardroom. Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg "Fossilman" Raymer also won his entry at the PokerStars online cardroom.
In October 2004, Sportingbet Plc, at the time the world's largest publicly traded online gaming company (SBT.L), announced the acquisition of ParadisePoker.com, one of the online poker industry's first and largest cardrooms. The $340 million dollar acquisition marked the first time an online cardroom was owned by a public company. Since then, several other 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.
The market appears to be currently in a consolidation phase. In early 2006, PartyGaming moved to acquire EmpirePoker.com from Empire Online. Later in the year, bwin, an Austrian based online gambling company, acquired PokerRoom.com. Other poker rooms such as PokerStars and Poker.com that were rumored to be exploring initial public offerings[2] have postponed them.
LegalityFrom a legal perspective, online poker may differ in some ways from online casino gambling. However, many of the same issues do apply. For a discussion of the legality of online gambling in general, see online gambling.
Online poker is legal and regulated in many countries including several nations in and around the Caribbean Sea, and most notably the United Kingdom.
In the United States, the North Dakota House of Representatives passed a bill in February 2005 to legalize and regulate online poker and online poker cardroom operators in the state. The legislation required that online poker operations would have to physically locate their entire operations in the state. Testifying before the state Senate Judiciary committee, Nigel Payne, CEO of Sportingbet and owner of Paradise Poker, pledged to relocate to the state if the bill became law.[3]
The measure, however, was defeated by the State Senate in March 2005 after the U. S. Department of Justice sent a letter to North Dakota attorney general Wayne Stenehjem stating that online gaming "may" be illegal, and that the pending legislation "might" violate the federal Wire Act. However, many legal experts dispute the DOJ's claim.
North Dakota Rep. Jim Kasper (R-Fargo), the author of the legalization bill, has vowed to continue his efforts. He states that he is "not putting away the idea of getting into Internet gaming licenses in North Dakota" and that the "revenue we missed is too great to pass up." Kasper has also stated that he will introduce the legislation in the 2007 session of the North Dakota legislature.
In response to this and other claims by the DOJ regarding the legality of online poker, many of the major online poker sites stopped advertising their "dot-com" sites in American media. Instead, they created "dot-net" sites that are virtually identical but offer no real money wagering. The sites advertise as poker schools or ways to learn the game for free, and feature words to the effect of "this is not a gambling website." Televised ads still feature the dot-net conceit but print ads have been trending back toward advertising the dot-coms directly.
In July 2006, United States federal agents, citing the Wire Act, arrested BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers in Dallas, Texas while he was changing planes. He was traveling between Costa Rica and the United Kingdom; in both jurisdictions online gaming and poker are legal and regulated.[4]
Later in the year a similar event happened in France, where Norbert Teufelberger and Manfred Bodner, the CEO's of bwin,[5] were giving a press conference. The arrest was made due to offenses against the French gambling laws.
Since many banks and credit card companies will not allow direct money transfers to online poker sites, electronic money transfer businesses provide online “e-wallets” that players can load from a bank account, then transfer the funds directly to the poker site. The advantage of these services is that it makes it easy for people to transfer money between different poker sites without the money going back to their bank accounts. Prepaid debit cards and virtual credit cards (cards issued for online use, as a card number, expiration date and CVC code) have also emerged as a method of payment for poker sites. These function much in the same way as an "e-wallet" since money deposited into the card account is not connected to the user's bank account.