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Online Poker Overview
playing poker at traditional, or "brick and mortar" venues for such as casinos and
online poker rooms, may be
intimidating for novice players and are located in
geographically disparate locations. Brick and mortar
casinos are also reticent to promote poker because it is
very difficult for them to profit from the activity.
Though the rake, or time charge, of traditional casinos
is often very 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 tend to be viewed as more
player-friendly. For example, the software may prompt
the player when it is his or her turn to act. Online
poker rooms also allow the players to play for very low
stakes (as low as 1?) and often offer poker freerolls
(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 also 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 player's IP
addresses in order to prevent players at the same
household or at known open proxy servers from playing on
the same tables.
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 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 triple the number of players over
the 2003 turnout. At least four players in the WSOP
final table won their entry through an online card room.
Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg "Fossilman" Raymer
also won his entry at the Poker Stars online card room.
In December 2003 it was reported that online poker
revenues stood at around $34m (? 40m) per month and were
growing by 27% per month. By March 2005, at peak times
approximately 100,000 people were playing for real money
at the various card rooms with a like number playing free
games. In October 2004, Sportingbet Plc, 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 card rooms.
The acquisition marked the first time an online card
room
was owned by a public company. Since then, several other
card room parent companies have gone public.
In June 2005, Party gaming, the parent company of the
largest online card room, 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. Legality
From a legal perspective, online poker may differ in
some ways from online casino gambling, but 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 the United Kingdom and several nations in and
around the Caribbean Sea. In February 2005 the North
Dakota House of Representatives passed a bill to
legalize and regulate online poker and online poker
card room operators in the State. Testifying before the
State Senate, the CEO of one online card room, Paradise
Poker, pledged to relocate to the state if the bill
became law. However, the measure was defeated by the
State Senate in March 2005.
Integrity and fairness
As with other forms of online gambling, many critics
question whether the operators of such games -
especially those located in jurisdictions separate from
most of their players - might be engaging in fraud
themselves.
Internet discussion forums are rife with unproven
allegations of non-random card dealing, possibly to
favor house-employed players or "bots" (poker playing
software disguised as a human opponent), or to give
multiple players good hands thus increasing the bets and
the rake, or simply to prevent new players from losing
so quickly that they become discouraged. However, there
is little more than anecdotal evidence to support such
claims, and others argue that the rake is sufficiently
large that such abuses would be unnecessary and foolish.
Many claim to see lots of "bad beats" with large hands
pitted against others all too often at a rate that seems
to be a lot more common than in live games. But this
theory is refuted by the concept that online poker does
not require time taken out to shuffle the deck. Thus, an
individual sees many more hands in a certain time period
and a higher likelihood of seeing randomly large pots.
Many online poker sites are certified by bodies such as
the Kahnawaki Gaming Commission, and major auditing
firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers review the fairness of
the shuffle and payouts for some sites.
The problem of finding a protocol to play poker without
a trusted dealer is called mental poker. Differences
between online and conventional poker
There are substantial differences between online poker
gaming and conventional, in-person gaming.
One obvious difference is that players do not sit right
across from each other, removing any ability to observe
others' reactions and body language. Instead, online
poker players learn to focus more keenly on betting
patterns, reaction time and other behavior tells that
are not physical in nature. Since poker is a game that
requires adaptability, successful online players learn
to master the new frontiers of their surroundings.
Another less obvious difference is the rate of play. In
brick and mortar casinos the dealer has to collect the
cards, then shuffle and deal them after every hand. Due
to this and other delays common in offline casinos, the
average rate of play is around thirty hands per hour.
Online casinos, however, do not have these delays; the
dealing and shuffling are instant, there are no delays
relating to counting chips (for a split pot), and on
average the play is faster due to "auto-action" buttons
(where the player selects his action before his turn).
It is not uncommon for an online poker table to average
sixty to eighty hands per hour.
This large difference in rate of play has created
another effect among online poker players. In the brick
and mortar casino, the only real way to increase your
earnings is to increase your limit. In the online world
players have another option, play more tables. Unlike a
physical casino where it would be nearly impossible to
play multiple tables at once, most online poker rooms
allow a player to be on up to 4 tables at once. For
example, a player may make around $10 per 100 hands at a
lower limit game. In a casino, this would earn them
under $4 an hour, which minus dealer tips would probably
barely break even. In an online poker room, the same
player with the same win rate could play four tables at
once, which at 60 hands per hour each would result in an
earning of $24/hour, which is a modest salary for
somebody playing online poker. Some online players even
play eight or more tables at once, in an effort to
increase their winnings.
Another important change results from the fact that
online poker rooms, in some cases, offer online poker
schools that teach the basics and significantly speed up
the learning curve for novices. Many online poker rooms
also provide free money play so that players may
practice these skills in various poker games and limits
without the risk of losing real money. People who
previously had no way to learn and improve because they
had no one to play with now have the ability to learn
the game much more quickly and gain invaluable
experience from free money play.
Tracking play
Tracking poker play in a B&M casino is very difficult.
You can easily monitor your winnings, but tracking any
detailed statistics about your game requires a player to
take notes after each hand, which is cumbersome and
distracting.
Conversely, tracking poker play online is easy. Most
online poker rooms support "Hand Histories" text files
which track every action both you and your opponents
made during each hand. The ability to specifically track
every single played hand has many advantages. Many
third-party software applications process hand history
files and return detailed summaries of poker play. These
not only include exact tallies of rake and winnings,
which are useful for tax purposes, but also offer
detailed statistics about the person's poker play.
Serious players use these statistics to check for
weaknesses or "leaks" (mistakes that leak money from
their winnings) in their game. Such detailed analysis of
poker play was never available in the past, but with the
growth of online poker play, it is now commonplace among
nearly all serious and professional online poker
players. (wikipedia.org)
Good Luck
from the
Online Casinos USA
team
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