“Royal Flush for Poker, New Online Craze”

Online gambling seems to be the rising star among Internet businesses and online poker appears to be the star of online gambling. In fact, it is the fastest growing segment of the online gambling industry by far and shows no sign of letting up.

While poker has always been a popular game, Internet poker has just fueled that popularity. In addition, to convenience and ease of play, many participants at online gambling sites feel that the sites allow them to practice and improve their poker skills so that they can then try playing at a real-life casino, where the stakes are considerably higher. Also, with online poker, it is possible to play literally hundreds of hands an hour. At real-life casinos, players can rarely play more than 30 hands in the same amount of time. Of course, there are disadvantages to the online gaming sites too, the biggest of which concerns its legality. Since online gambling sites are illegal in the United States, it is a legally gray area whether someone residing in the U.S. is within in the law if he uses a computer to participate in gambling activities. Another drawback of Internet gambling sites is that they are ripe for the easy manipulation of game outcomes since players cannot be fully protected from collusion in a game by other players.

Still, the problem of collusion, can at least be addressed, even if only slightly, by players if they lookout for excessive raising activity and by remembering to play only at online casinos with large numbers of players. Players should also stick to sites that have live monitoring and auditing. It’s also helpful to glance at the feedback reports that other players have posted.

Advantages and disadvantages aside, the site operators are seeing only the up side of online gambling and, in particular, of online poker. Statistics gathered on the subject bear this out; there are approximately 1.8 million online poker players worldwide and poker operators took in about $1.4 billion in revenues last year. Moreover, they are expecting to generate revenues of $2.8 billion dollars a year.

Typically, sites garner their revenues by taking anywhere from three to five percent from the pot. They also make money from poker tournaments where they get paid about five to ten percent of the prize money and that percentage comes to about a half a million dollars!