The 2003 Poker Boom explained: Online Poker

In this series I’m going to try to outline the major forces that came together to produce the 2003 “Poker Boom” and why these forces will likely never be repeated again. In my opinion there were actually five factors that had a hand in creating the Poker Boom:

• Chris Moneymaker
• Positively Fifth Street
• Rounders (poker is a skill game)
• Online Poker
• The Hole Card Camera

It’s really hard to factor the importance of each in the grand scheme of things, since they all essentially played off of one another. So in this series I’ll take a look at each factor individually and explain its role in the 2003 Poker Boom and how it meshed with the other aspects of the Poker Boom.

Online Poker

Lost in the shuffle of the 2003 WSOP win by Chris Moneymaker was the fact that online poker was already about five years old. So Chris Moneymaker was as much a product of online poker as he was responsible for driving players to the online poker sites!

Online Poker was launched in 1998 by Planet Poker and by 2003 there was already a thriving industry that included PokerStars, Party Poker, Paradise Poker, and Ultimate Bet to name just a few of the big players. With or without Chris Moneymaker (or positively Fifth Street or Rounders) people were already finding their way to online poker sites by the thousand. Let’s not forget that over 800 players registered for the 2003 WSOP BEFORE the poker boom ever happened.

I remember playing in casinos in 2001 where online poker was discussed daily, it was already a known commodity and there were plenty of people showing up at the casino who had learned to play online well before 2003.

Online Poker and Chris Moneymaker

Chris Moneymaker will be forever linked to online poker (and with PokerStars in particular) but to me it’s the classic question of which came first; the chicken or the egg?

Online Poker and Positively Fifth Street

As I mentioned in the Positively Fifth Street portion of this series the book likely brought plenty of middle-aged players to the online poker tables.

Online Poker and Rounders

Rounders was the reason so many players had already made their way to online poker tables by 2003, and the reason so many young players were playing in the 2003 WSOP (remember The Crew?).

Online Poker and the Hole-Card Camera

Online Poker and the hole-card camera have very little connection, but between the two they are likely more responsible that the other three factors. Eventually, thanks to the hole-card camera, poker was going to take off, and with or without televised poker online poker was going to dominate the poker industry for the next decade.