Online casinos offer so many different games that even the most fickle player would be satisfied for a long time. On the other hand, most of them are single-player games of chance (online slots, roulette, craps, et cetera). There’s only one game out there if you want to pit your skills against human opponents, and that game is poker.
In fact, poker is one of the big reasons that the online gambling industry is as big as it is. Right around the turn of the century, just as computers were starting to have the power to offer a richer online experience, poker started to boom. In a few short years, Texas Hold’em went from a pastime of gamblers to a mainstream media sensation.
When Chris Moneymaker took the World Series of Poker title in 2003 after qualifying at online satellites, new players flocked to the Internet for poker by the hundreds of thousands. It may not be too far from the truth to say that the Internet as a whole benefited from the increased popularity and especially security and safety that was required of these online poker websites.
Sites like Full Tilt and Poker Stars suddenly had big budget marketing opportunities, and newcomers like Bodog quickly got in on the action. Our favorite, Cake Poker, began as a small quality-oriented network for discerning players, and drew enough business to expand this mission to become one of the best poker networks in the world (hooking up with, among others, Doyle Brunson, the father of Texas Hold’em, when Doyle’s Room joined the network last year).
An interesting footnote is that the UIGEA, while an extreme annoyance for online casino USA players, failed to drive out the major players in the online poker world. So all of the great sites that I mentioned above are still ready to accept US players.