The Popularity of Poker
March 6, 2007
Poker started to became popular worldwide since the famous tournaments such as The World Poker Tour and The World Series of Poker started to be broadcasted. People saw a chance of making money just like the players they see in those tournaments and begun to play the game very much. Not just simple people but also celebrities like Ben Affleck for example who won $356,400 and the Commerce Casino’s California State Poker Championship in June 2004.
Poker is also a business, it brings very much money each year, in 2003 poker made $4.5 billion, estimates Bear Stearns. It is expected that in 2005 this sum to exceed $10 billion. PokerPulse.com stated that in just 24 hours March 13, 2005, $200,463,154 .00 was wagered online.
The televised tournaments also changed the way people see poker. No longer is poker the game played in shady rooms, now it’s played in a friendly environment. The number of competitors increases every year and that makes it better for the experts because they can use their skills to win more at the tournament.
The champions are also different, because now unlike the previous years, the winners are from different domains: Financial Analysts, Rocket Scientists, Attorneys, and Mathematicians, all successful at the table. Also the game is friendly with the poor likewise. In 2004 at the WSOP one homeless person won $40,000 and said that poker took him off the streets.
The internet has become a major factor in building champions, at the 2003 and 2004 WSOP the winners were players who played the game online. Often online poker rooms offer seats to main events to the winner of certain online tournaments. The poker is just getting started so keep an eye on the event.
