The Texas Holdem poker phenomenon has taken the country by storm. According to reports, there are more than 100 million active poker players around the world. The popularity of poker is largely the byproduct of technology and several recent trends: 1) online gaming, where players interact and socialize in real time over the Internet, and 2) the widespread publicity created by poker television shows. high profile such as the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and World Poker Tour (WPT).
With all the poker mania, a modern day “gold rush” is underway. Analyst estimates are a little vague, but some estimate that people will spend as much as $4.5 billion in 2005 on poker-related items of all kinds, including:
* Online poker room game
* Poker tournaments
* Financial brokers from online poker rooms (for example, Firepay, NetTeller, Citadel and others)
* Casino poker rooms
* Game drives for your TV
* Sets of poker chips and dealer buttons (you can even get “collector’s” edition dealer buttons signed by the pros. I got some as a Christmas present this year!)
* Poker tables and instructions on how to build poker tables
* Poker software (poker odds calculators, poker games, local tournament organizers, tournament director kits)
* Texas Holdem poker rule and starting hole cards
* Poker schools and training courses.
* Poker books and strategy ebooks.
* Poker hats, t-shirts and apparel
* Local poker clubs
* Free Texas Holdem poker items of every imaginable kind.
To give you an idea of how many people are now playing for real money online, take a look at PokerPulse.com. PokerPulse monitors the major online poker rooms and keeps track of how many real money poker games are running at any one time. Some estimates based on these statistics suggest that online poker room companies are billing over $110 million US dollars every 24 hours, with hundreds of thousands of online players active every night.
So, with the global inertia that poker has today, how far can it go? Will it be like CB radio: a brief flash in the pan and then all of a sudden, poof! Is it just another fad and throwback, with occasional throwbacks like Smokey and the Bandit? It’s hard to say for sure, but with the momentum, the hype, and so many young people, including many teenagers and children playing on the internet, it could be that the big bang in poker has just happened and its expansion has really only just begun…
As with many new and controversial phenomena like poker, there is the aspect of social morality and the question: is playing poker gambling? Is it really just a game of skill? The question of whether online poker rooms are as much about gambling as traditional casino games and online bookmaker operations is certainly one that is shaping some industries and creating others. Before looking for answers to those questions, let’s explore what the actions of certain parties might lead us to believe.
For example, traditional credit card processors (MC, VISA, AMEX, PayPal and others) have decided to discontinue the use of their credit card services to fund players’ online poker accounts. Today, there is a whole cottage industry that has sprung up to meet the enormous demand for transferring funds between bank accounts and online poker room accounts, processing untold millions of dollars every day.
Try advertising a poker related article through Google AdWords or the Yahoo/MSN equivalent (Overture) and you’ll quickly find that they have a category known as “Gambling URLs” that will come into play. Any website that may be associated with online poker rooms is considered a “gambling” site and therefore advertising services are disallowed. So what happened as a result? Well, aside from these companies losing advertising revenue, it has forced the poker industry into fierce competition for poker-related search “namespaces.” Try searching for something using keywords like “texas holdem poker” and see what you find.
It’s amazing how clogged the search engine namespace has become, with every search engine optimization (SEO) technique and trick known to man being used by poker website owners in an attempt to gain visibility. , page ranking and routing more visitor traffic to your websites
In my opinion, the answer to the question “Is playing poker gambling?” is – it depends. It depends on the skill level of the player. If you are a very skilled player, IMHO this is not about gambling: this is about playing a sophisticated game like chess, where you must not only defeat opponents, but also use strategy and play with the odds to win.
You beat the odds by playing only certain starting hands from given positions at the table, adjusting your play according to the game situation, understanding other players’ styles and developing a winning strategy, throwing your weight (stack) around at times suitable and sitting outside at other times. No, it’s far from a gamble for many of us. However, for those who do not possess the required skills, it is more common to bet no, as skill is a much less important factor for such players. Since the basic rules are deceptively simple, people often have no idea why they hit them.
However, what makes it very different from traditional casino gambling is that you are not playing against the house. The online poker room charges a “rake”, a percentage of the money that is at stake (for example, 10% or so), which is the online poker room’s way of generating revenue. It doesn’t really matter who wins or loses, as the poker operator always gets paid to host the game.
I’ll cover popular online poker rooms in a future article in more detail, but suffice to say, there’s gold in them and the market leaders have banked on the claims, who are making fortunes providing their sophisticated online service businesses. to millions of enthusiastic gamers around the world.
Since these businesses cannot operate within US borders, they are largely unregulated (at least by US standards) and new ones continue to pop up every month. Now, I don’t want it to sound like everyone playing online is playing for real money, quite the opposite. There are a huge number of players who only use “play money” and have a lot of fun playing and socializing through the use of instant messages and interactions through the online poker room site.
So is the poker phenomenon a trend or just another fad that is destined to take its place in our video library besides Smokey and the Bandit and that CB radio wave that peaked in the 1970s? Hard to say for sure. One thing is for sure. Lots of people have fun playing in online poker rooms, land-based casinos, and their own home games, while an army of others fill that demand and win loads of money in the process.
Until next time – Good luck!
Haystack