“Online Gambling Craze Just Gets Crazier”

Reports showing the popularity of online gambling in Britain are just one more indication of the global appeal of this booming industry. And one particular game, Poker, seems to be the hands-down winner in this popularity contest.

With online gambling becoming more acceptable and mainstream, it is also growing more popular, particularly in the UK. In the last two years approximately four percent of British adults have gambled over the Internet. And the Gaming Board of Great Britain, whose job it is to oversee casinos in the UK, expects that number will increase exponentially.

There has been an explosion in the online gambling industry, signified not least by the sheer increase in number of online gambling sites. In 1996 there were only thirty of them, with annual revenues of 30 million dollars; now there are approximately two thousand online poker sites alone, generating revenues of 9.2 billion dollars. Poker is enormously popular, and it is not only the Americans who love it; though sports betting accounts for about 45 percent of internet gambling activity – 32 percent by other types of gambling – all bets are on poker to surpass that 45% mark by the year 2008. The biggest provider of poker sites on the web – Paradise Poker, recently purchased by Sportingbet – predicts that the market value of online poker will go way up from its current 1.5 billion dollars in the next few years.