The History of Online Poker

Some of you want to know the history of Online Poker. The land based game has been around for thousands of years, but it’s less than 10 years since technological advances enabled the online game to entertain us anytime day or night. It has been a long, but not entirely trouble free road, and it may come as a surprise to many of you to know that first mover advantage in online poker did not go to Party Poker. The year was 1998 and Planet Poker launched the world’s first online poker room. A truly brilliant idea and for the day excellent looking software that dealt cards day and night. All this and all you needed to take part was a computer and a 28k modem! The competition were well behind and Party Poker was not so much as a bubble in a bottle of Guinness. Soon thereafter a half dozen other copycat outfits joined the online poker market and these trailblazers began to pick up significant amounts of traffic by word of mouth as much as any other form of traditional advertising. Disaster for the pioneer Planet Poker, and for that matter the fledgling Online Poker industry came in 1999 when a group "good" hackers called the Reliable Software Group broke Planet Poker’s shuffling mechanism and published the details on the internet for all to see. What they realized was that the card dealing program was not entirely random, in fact they were able to replicate the program to accurately predict all cards dealt in real time. This of course was a major story at the time and exposed Planet’s software to the sort of negative publicity that company CEO’s have nightmares about. The question was, how many others had broken the code and profited from it before Reliable managed to do so. Back in the infancy of online poker the rooms had spent all their time and a good deal of resources developing the poker playing interface and insufficient time working on security. As soon as Planet became aware of the issue they immediately replaced the shuffling mechanism and reviewed their site security. They never recovered from the PR disaster that claimed them. Planet poker as online poker pioneers virtually disappeared from the scene to be replaced by the dominant poker provider today Party Poker. Planet still exist today but under different ownership. Party Poker clearly benefited from the misfortune of their rival, but they also led the way in marketing by sponsoring the World Poker Tour on television and captured audiences with the invention of the "Handy Cam" TV camera that enables viewers the opportunity to see the hidden cards of each player. Their success has more to do with these factors but the early days of Online Poker were an interesting lesson in corporate management and software testing. Today security remains paramount in the view of our readers as evidenced by our poker poll on the subject. One thing we can say is that the security of the random shuffling program is foremost on the minds of all online poker executives thanks to lessons learned at Planet. Party Poker have since dealt 4.2 billion hands of cards. I think it’s fair to say they have secure random shuffling! If you want to join the fun, in a fully tested secure environment we suggest you visit PartyPoker.

Published on: 2006-05-11 (6588 reads)