Play Poker Today!!!
Traditional (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, like those at PartyPoker.com, 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 stakes (as low as 1¢) and often offer poker freeroll tournaments (like the Rookie Daily Freerolls), 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. PartyPoker, with both real-money games and free-play games, has been a trusted leader in gaming online since 1997.
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. In June 2005, PartyGaming, the parent company of the then largest online cardroom, PartyPoker.com, 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.
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 that were rumored to be exploring initial public offerings have postponed them.
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, like PartyPoker.com where players can download poker games for free.
The World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a poker tournament held annually in Las Vegas. The first WSOP in 1970 was an invitational wherein Benny Binion invited six of the best known poker players to the Horseshoe Casino. At first, the WSOP grew slowly. It was twelve years before the WSOP drew 52 participants, in 1982. In the early 1980s, satellite tournaments were introduced, allowing people to win their way into the various events. By 1987, there were over 2,100 entrants in the entire series. Participation in the Main Event peaked in 2006, with 8,773 players competing.
The first World Series of Poker was not a freeze-out tournament, but rather an event with a set start and stop time, with the winner determined by secret ballot. In 1973, five-card stud was added as a second event. Since 2007, the WSOP has consisted of 55 events. While events traditionally take place over one or more consecutive days during the series in June and July, in 2008, the Main Event final table was delayed until November. The winner of each event receives a World Series of Poker bracelet and a monetary prize based on the number of entrants and buy-in amounts. A World Series of Poker bracelet is considered the most coveted prize or trophy a poker player can win, with one from the Main Event revered above all others. Since 1976, a bracelet has been awarded to the winner of every event at the annual WSOP. WSOP victories prior to 1976 are also known as "bracelets". Most of the major poker variants are featured, though in recent years over half of the events have been variants of Texas hold 'em.
The series culminates with the $10,000 no-limit hold'em "Main Event", which since 2004 has attracted entrants numbering in the thousands. The victor receives a multi-million dollar prize. The winner of the World Series of Poker Main Event is considered to be the World Champion of Poker. Since its inception, Stu Ungar and Johnny Moss are the only players to have won the Main Event three times, though Moss's first victory came in a different format than that now used as he was elected winner by vote of his fellow players at the conclusion of what was then a timed event. Moss (if the first time win by vote is counted), Ungar, Doyle Brunson, and Johnny Chan are the only people who have won the Main Event in consecutive years. Johnny Chan's second victory in 1988 was featured on the 1998 film Rounders. Phil Hellmuth holds multiple WSOP records: most bracelets (11), most WSOP cashes (75), and most WSOP final tables (41). The 2009 Main Event bracelet winner, Joe Cada, is the youngest person to win the Main Event. Since 2005, the WSOP has been sponsored by Harrah's Entertainment.