Over recent years, the game of online poker has taken off dramatically. It has also led to an increase in the number of people around the world who play poker or have knowledge of the game. Revenues from sites that provide online poker games have increased from about 80 million USD to about 2 billion USD from just 2001 to 2005.
There are various probable reasons for this trend. The first would be that the venues that people gather to play poker and variants of poker are usually intimidating to the beginner. Also, they are often located in places that are difficult to get to or visit on a regular basis. Secondly, casinos do not promote the game of poker because they do not often make money with it.
Poker online is much cheaper to run, as it does not take up space and allows very low stakes for the players. In addition, the game can be monitored in ways that a real poker game cannot. The hands are unknown to anybody if the cards held by a player are folded, for example. However, in online poker they are saved in the history of the game so that it can be recovered and any kind of fraud detected. They also note the IP addresses of the players to prevent them from starting a simultaneous game at the same table.
This trend has been around for several years, having started in the late 1990s. Real money was played as early as 1998. However, poker played online was not always legal. It gained legality in North Dakota in February 2005, asking the dealers to physically locate inside the state itself. This decision is still disputed, as it is considered by some to violate the Wire Act. However, it is clear that the trend is here to stay.