Poker Room

**************************************************************************************
Portuguese Note: Clique aqui se esta procurando o Pokerroom.com
**************************************************************************************

The number of online poker players has been dramaticly increased in the past 10 years. One of the reason for that is online venues have much cheaper overhead costs compare to the land based casinos and that allows online poker rooms to offer the players a lot to play for low stakes.

Online players can find limits as low as $.01/$.02. Lowest limits at traditional casinos are often $1/$2. Some of the online poker rooms offer freeroll poker tournaments without a entry fee.

Free online poker was played since late 1990s by IRC poker. They actually played poker over the IRC chat network with imaginary money, but attracted a devoted following of experts.

Then on 1 January 1998, Planet Poker, the world's first real money online poker room was launched and became very successful. This opened the door of the fastest growing industries to the world. Planet Poker’s founder, Randy Blumer believed his instincts and passion for poker without any existing model to follow, and made it happen.

After a while, a game could continue through the night with enough players rotating in and out. It sounds normal today, but it was truly a breakthrough in the history of online poker even though there were many challenges to meet the demand of the steady stream of new players and technical issue.

So, what is a major difference between online poker game and conventional poker game?
The obvious difference is you can't see other players and observe their reactions and body language. Instead, online poker players have to focus on betting patterns, speed of play, opponents' fold/flop percentages, chat room, etc.

Another difference is the rate of play. Unlike land based casinos, the dealer doesn't need to collect the cards, shuffle, and deal them after every hand etc. It means online poker room does not have delays. Everything is instant, and there is no need to count chips either.

In the Land based casinos, to increase your earnings is to increase your limit, but in the online world, players can play more tables. Unlike a physical casino where it would be impossible to play multiple tables at same time, most online poker rooms allow this, and players can view each in a separate window on the computer. That will allow players to earn more per hour.

Online poker sites have collusion detection abilities because they can check at the hand history of the cards previously played by any players on the site, making patterns of behavior easier to detect than in a traditional casino where colluding players can simply fold their hands without anyone ever knowing the strength of their holding.

Online poker rooms check players' IP addresses in order to prevent players at the same household or at known open proxy servers from playing on the same tables as well. However, insider cheating did occur when a person with trusted access to the system uses a position to play poker himself with an unfair advantage.

For example, there was a major case when Absolute Poker acknowledged that their employee, who had been able to play at high stakes while viewing his opponents' hidden "hole" cards in 2007, as well as former employees of UltimateBet accused of using a software backdoor to see opponents' cards in 2008.

Finally, online poker rooms often offer online poker schools to teach the beginners, and free play to practice skills and limits without the risk of losing real money.
Many online poker rooms offer incentives to players in the form of bonuses and VIP programs to reward regular players for an additional bonuses exist for players who wish to top-up their accounts. Others offer tournaments and the winners gain entry to real-life poker tournaments.

These days, there are many online poker rooms to choose from.
Hopefully, we have all the imformation you need here and be useful!