The best thing about these poker rooms are that they do not have any buy-ins which means that you can play for a sponsored prize play pool all for the cost of nothing

1. Play Poker Online
Poker is one of the most popular card games
played in casinos worldwide. Many card
games (along with poker) share their hand
rankings and betting rules. This game has
grown in its popularity in the recent years,
thus, resulting in the introduction of online
poker. Online poker lets the users or the
players play poker online. It means playing
the game of poker over the Internet.
According to the Christiansen Capital Advisors, the revenues of online poker increased from 82
million dollars (2001) to 2.5 billion dollars (2005). On the other hand, Global Betting consultants
conducted a survey and it concluded that the revenues in 2004 were at 1.5 billion dollars.
The online casinos, in comparison to the “brick and mortar casinos” are quite cheap because
they have very less overhead costs. For example, an addition of a table would cost much less
than creating a B&M casino. The online poker lets its players play poker online at very low
bets and offer an entry-fee free tournament. These kinds of offers attract both the beginners
and wealthy clients. The online poker playing facilities provided by sites are more prone to the

2. frauds, majorly, collusion between its players. However collusion can be detected in online poker,
something that the B&M casinos lack.
The first free online poker was played in the late 1900s. The first online cardroom that offered
games with real money was Planet Poker. Many poker sites offer variety of features to attract
new players. The main common attraction is to offer Satellites. Satellites are tournaments whose
winners can be allowed to enter the real poker tournaments. It was through this kind of a
tournament that led to the winning of Chris Moneymaker in the World Series of Poker in the year
2003. His win was a shock to the poker world.
The major poker traffic can be experienced on just a few main networks like the Full Tilt Poker,
PokerStars and iPoker Network. Currently there are more than 500 websites offering the facility
to its users to play poker online. Amongst them, approximately 25 sites are stand- alone sites and
the rest of them operate on shared networks. These sites are called skins and the majority of these
skins can be found operating on the largest network, which is iPoker. The largest poker-playing
site is Pokerstars.com as it has the highest number of players registered on it.
Online poker is regulated and considered legal in a large number of countries, especially the
United Kingdom. In the Unites States a bill was passed in the year 2005, to regulate and legalize
the online poker and its cardroom operators. This was however cancelled when U.S DoJ said
that legalization of online poker gaming might result in the violation of the Wire Act. Due to all

3. the responses from DoJ etc, many poker sites stopped the advertisements of their dot com sites.
Instead, they developed dot net sites that are identical virtually, but don’t involve the use of money
or any kind of betting. In addition, these sites advertise themselves as poker schools that help
their users learn to play poker for free and show statements like “it is not a gambling site”. In the
year 2010, the supreme court of Washington, made a law, stating that playing online poker is a
punishable offence.
There are 4 methods by which these sites generate revenues in bulk. The first one is rake. Rake is
collected from the real money cash games. Each poker room has its own rake structure. The rake
is usually very small as running a poker table online is less costly. Second method is to charge an
entry fee of around 5-10 percent of the entire tournament. Third method is to play cash games like
the blackjack against the house involving real money. Fourth method is the profitably investing
the receipts of the players.