Poker Nation and Moneymaker

Paris Hilton and Pam Anderson play it and Cinderella-story stars like Chris Moneymaker make millions at it. Small wonder Online Poker is so explosively popular.

In case you haven't noticed the card-by-card coverage of Texas Hold'em tournaments on TSN and ESPN -- and for that matter every other sports network -- Poker is in the midst of a major renaissance. Television ads, billboards and Web-based click-through banner ads blare the praises of Online Poker.

The companies that run the real-money games tease new players into free sites, where you can play and learn Holdem and other forms of Online Poker without risking a dime. But as you learn the game and build a stake of chips playing against beginners, you are faced with the lure of trying your luck against real players for real money. Free dot-net sites all have easy links to dot-com versions.

Poker Tournament in Las Vegas are major sporting events, festooned with ads for online poker sites and featuring athletes who look like they could barely climb a flight of stairs.

Blame Chris Moneymaker. A nobody from Tennessee, Moneymaker put up $40 and built it into $10,000 in qualifying tournaments held in online poker rooms. What he qualified for was the 2003 World Series of
Poker the first live Poker Tournament he had ever played in. He won.

Moneymaker was no rookie player. He honed his Poker skills playing at the PokerStars.com website, winning a few online tournaments as he gained experience.

It is that image that PokerStars -- and all of the hundreds of Poker websites that have sprung into existence since 2003 -- have leveraged into a truly massive enterprise.

How big is hard to know and the business landscape is complex. A handful of the big Online Poker companies are publicly traded, so their revenues are easy to get. The vast majority of the business, though, is privately owned and offshore, nestled on Caribbean atolls and tiny island banking havens away from the reach of the U.S. authorities.

Annoyed that Americans were gambling away about $6 billion a year online, the U.S. Congress tried to stop the bleeding by passing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006. The act made it illegal for credit card companies to transfer funds to further online gambling and effectively criminalizing the act of receiving a bet.

While the law remains virtually untested, its impact was felt around the world.

Stock in Gibraltar-based PartyGaming Plc, which ran the world's biggest online poker system, fell from a total market value of $9 billion to about $1 billion almost overnight. PokerStars and a host of other privately owned Online Poker companies moved in to soak up the business that PartyGaming walked away from. A website fronted by long-time professional Online Poker player Doyle Brunson brought in Pamela Anderson and Nicky and Paris Hilton for their star power. Many other sites bring in top-ranked pros for people to play against and continue to brazenly do business in the U.S.