The World of Online Poker: Serious Game and Serious Business

Online poker is not only a serious game in many ways, but a serious business as well. Millions of players around the world take part in online poker games, with the business quickly springing up in the late 1990s and rapidly growing into a multi-billion dollar business for the companies involved.

As the Internet became widely available, applications and games sprang up that let poker fans get their poker fix online, playing free money games on a variety of websites. What took online poker from more of a casual game to a serious game, though, was the introduction of real money into the equation, which began in the late 1990s when sites like Planet Poker, Paradise Poker, and PartyPoker started offering players the chance to play online poker for real money. A poker site for US players was very easy to find, as the US market was the largest at the time, with sites springing up weekly trying to get a piece of the action.

While some players today would classify themselves as recreational players, solely looking to play poker for entertainment, the majority of online poker players are driven by a more serious desire: winning money. With that in mind, online poker has quickly been transformed, with professional players using a variety of tools to help them beat the game and extract money from less skilled players.

Today’s serious online poker player has a wide range of tools at his or her disposal, including training sites, database software that collects all of their hands and lets them analyze their own betting tendencies and flaws, and software applications that pull from mined data to graphically display how opponents have played in the past. Any entertainment they might have once gotten from the game is an afterthought, as their job instead has become finding a way to extract the most money out of the game as possible, using any and every tool at their disposal.


------------------------------
Check the latest posts from this blog here.
------------------------------
Serious Games Portal Site
@seriousgames

serious games