The Texas hold’em poker phenomenon has taken the country by storm. There are reportedly above 100 million active poker gamblers worldwide. Poker’s popularity is largely the byproduct of technology and various current trends: one) internet based gaming, wherever players engage and socialize in real-time through the Net, and 2) the broad publicity developed by good profile TV shows like the World Series of Poker and WPT.
With all of the poker-mania, there’s a modern day "gold rush" underway today. Analyst estimates are a bit sketchy, but several estimate that men and women will invest up to 4.5 billion dollars U.S. in ‘05 on poker-related objects of each sort, such as:
* Web poker room play
* Poker tournaments
* On-line poker room financial brokers (e.g., Firepay, NetTeller, Citadel and others)
* Betting house poker rooms
* Game units for your TV
* Poker chip sets and dealer buttons (it is possible to even get "collector" edition croupier buttons signed by the pros – got some as Christmas presents this year!)
* Poker tables and instructions for how you can create poker tables
* Poker software (poker odds calculators, poker games, house tournament organizers, tournament director kits)
* Texas hold em poker rule and starting hand cards
* Poker schools and training courses
* Poker books and strategy e-books
* Poker hats, shirts and clothing objects
* Local poker clubs
* Free Hold em poker stuff of each variety imaginable.
To give you an strategy of how several men and women are now betting with real-money on line, possess a look at PokerPulse.com. PokerPulse keeps tabs on the top internet based poker rooms and tracks how several real-money poker games are running at any point in time. Some estimates based upon these statistics advise that on-line poker room businesses are turning over in excess of $110 million U.S. every 24 hours, with hundreds of thousands of web players active any given evening.
So, using the worldwide inertia that poker has right now, how far can it go? Will it be like the CB Radio – a brief flash in the pan and then suddenly – poof! Will it be just a different fad and memory, with occasional reminders like Smokey and the Bandit? Very difficult to say for positive, except using the momentum, promoting and so quite a few young men and women, which include many teenagers and kids wagering across the Web, it could be that the poker big bang has occured and its expansion has only actually begun…
As with a lot of new, controversial phenomenon such as poker, there is the social morality aspect and query: Is playing poker gambling? Is it seriously just a casino game of talent? The question of whether online poker rooms are just as a lot about wagering as conventional casino games and online bookie operations is certainly one that’s shaping a number of industries, and creating some others. Before we appear for the answers to those questions, let us explore what the actions of certain parties may possibly lead us to believe.
For instance, the regular credit card processors (MC, VISA, AMEX, PayPal, and other people) decided to discontinue use of their credit card services to fund player’s web based poker accounts. Nowadays, there is a whole cottage industry that has sprung up to fill the enormous demand for transferring funds between bank accounts and internet based poker place accounts, processing untold millions of dollars every day.
Try marketing a poker-related item as a result of Google’s AdWords or the Yahoo/MSN comparable (Overture) and you’ll quickly discover they possess a category known as "Gambling URL" that’ll come into play. Any web site that could be associated to on-line poker rooms is considered a "betting" site and advertising services are thereby refused. So, what happened as a result? Well, aside from these firms losing marketing revenues, it’s forced the poker industry into fierce competition for the poker-related search "namespaces". Attempt searching for something using keywords like "Texas hold em poker" and see what you find.
It’s amazing at how clogged up the search engine namespace has turn out to be, with just about every search engine optimization approach and trick identified to man being used by poker web page owners in an attempt to gain visibility, page ranking and routing of a lot more visitor traffic to their websites.
In my opinion, the answer to the question "Is betting poker wagering?" is – it depends. It depends on the gambler’s ability level. If you are a highly-skilled gambler, then In My Humble Opinion it is really not wagering – it is betting a sophisticated game like chess, in which you not only must defeat the opponents except you must also use technique and play the odds to be able to win.
You beat the odds by betting only selected starting hands from provided positions at the table, adjusting your wager on based upon the game situation, understanding other players’ styles, and by developing a method for winning, throwing your weight (chip stack) around in the appropriate times, and by sitting out at other times. No, it is really far from wagering for a lot of of us. On the other hand, for those who don’t possess the requisite abilities, it’s gambling far more often than it really is not, since ability is substantially less of a factor for such players. Since the basic rules are deceptively basic, people today often have no strategy why they are beaten.
What makes it extremely various from conventional gambling house wagering games, though, is that you’re not betting against the house. The on-line poker space takes a "rake", a percentage of the money that’s in wager on (for example, ten per-cent or so), which is how the net poker home generates revenues. It does not seriously matter who wins or loses, since the poker operator constantly gets paid for hosting the game.
I will cover well-known on line poker rooms in a near future article in much more detail, but suffice it to say, there’s gold in them there hills and the claims have been staked by the market leaders, who are raking in fortunes providing their sophisticated web service businesses to millions of eager gamblers worldwide.
Since these business are not allowed to function within U.S. borders, they are virtually unregulated (at least by U.S. standards) and new ones continue to pop up every single month. Now I do not need to make it sound like everyone who plays on the net is wagering with actual money – quite the contrary. There is an enormous variety of gamblers who just use "play money" and have a real blast betting and socializing via the use of instant messaging and interactions by way of the web-based poker room site.
So, is the poker phenomenon a trend or just a different fad that’s destined to take it is place in our video library, beside Smokey and the Bandit and that CB radio wave that crested in the 70’s? Hard to say for sure. One thing is for certain. A lot of individuals are having fun playing in internet poker rooms, at classic casinos and in their own property games – while an army of people are supplying that demand, and making a boatload of money in the process.