“Online Poker Gets More Than Its Fifteen Minutes”

If online gambling is the most popular internet business, then poker is the most popular online gambling game. While players need to be careful about which sites they patronize, there’s no doubt about the fact that there’s lots of money to be made in this fastest growing segment of the online gambling industry.

Poker has always been a popular game. But online poker is in a category unto itself. The advantages, of course, are many: convenience, ease of play, the ability to hone skills and gain invaluable practice in order to play well in real casinos where the stakes are much higher. Another advantage: time. An online player can play hundreds of poker hands in the same amount of time a real-life-casino player can play about thirty.

There are of course disadvantages too, the major one being the murky legal situation. Online gambling sites are illegal in the United States, a fact which gives rise to the question: can a person living in the United States legally participate in online gambling via his computer?

The online gambler has cause for other concerns too. Online players can’t be totally protected from collusion in a game by other players; real-life casinos are not subject to the kind of game outcome manipulation that online casinos are. But players can at least try to protect themselves by choosing their sites carefully. They should only use sites that are monitored and audited on an ongoing and live basis, they should be wary if they see excessive raising activity, and they should choose online casinos that have many players. If other players have posted feedback reports, it would be a good idea to look at those too.

Online gambling – and particularly online poker – has been very good for site operators, who earned about $1.4 billion in revenues last year and are hoping to up that number to $2.8 billion. The sites themselves take three to five percent from the pot, and about five to ten percent of prize money awarded at poker tournaments, a percentage equivalent to approximately half a million dollars. At the moment there are about 1.8 million online poker players worldwide, but that number is growing all the time, good news for site operators everywhere.