Online gaming today is a major international attraction that brings in billions of dollars annually. From first-person-shooters like Call of Duty to MOBAs like DOTA2, the range of titles and the size of their tournaments are only growing. Yet, despite this long legacy, an important portion of their success comes from somewhere many players might not expect – online poker.
With humble origins, online poker has continued to drive interest into the greater world of digital interactive entertainment. Looking at modern options and the journey traveled, we want to explore how we got here, and what we might expect in the years and decades to come.
The Modern State of Online Poker
Online poker in the 2020s is an enormous industry with players across practically every country in the world. Major websites feature a broad selection of tables, covering a spectrum of buy-ins and poker subtypes. From the most famous contemporary games like Hold’em variants to more classic releases like Omaha, players always have ways to engage, no matter their tastes.
This breadth of selection also extends to access options, with modern online poker playable from almost every HTML5-capable device. Users might choose to engage from a powerful gaming computer, or they could play their hands from older and less powerful smartphone systems. This level of flexibility of access between different systems is still not entirely common in the online world, with online poker delivering a high level of consistent quality that aids the ever-important user experience.
Whether entering into high-stakes cash games in poker online to casual experiences with stakes at just a few cents, all of these approaches help illustrate the best elements of what the internet provides. It’s easy to engage with, it’s playable nearly everywhere, and the selection is varied enough to entertain any taste.
Getting to Where We Are Today
As profound and full-featured as the modern online poker industry is, it wasn’t always this way. The first steps were limited in scope, but they still set a precedent that collected many early web-surfers’ attention. This first started back well before the age of smartphones, when the standard level of internet most people could expect came from a 56k modem.
The download speed of a 56k modem made any kind of surfing or online gaming a limited process. For a direct comparison from a download calculator website, saving a 10-megabyte file on a connection at this speed would take around 25 minutes. On any modern connection, 10 megabytes would download in less than a second.
Source: Pixabay
What this meant for users is that any kind of online interactive entertainment needed to be simple. It couldn’t require significant data downloads, it couldn’t require quick response times, and given the speeds of computers at the time, it couldn’t be too visually impressive. This meant that many of the experiences people dreamed of playing couldn’t work in the late 90s, but this wasn’t the case for poker.
Poker, like many casino games, can be relayed simply. The core of the experience is about the gameplay, about sets of cards and different players going head-to-head. Interpreting this kind of gameplay was simple, even for the slow connections of the times, and forward-thinking developers took notice. Once online casinos appeared around 1997, online poker soon followed.
Thanks to poker already being so successful in the physical space, its entry into the online world was near-instantly jumped on by card fans. Instead of waiting for their usual games or visiting a physical casino, players could easily load into poker online with friends or strangers. Signing up was easy, playing was streamlined, and since the game didn’t feature strict hardware requirements, thousands of players flocked to the tables.
Smartphones Resetting the Stage
Online poker had already laid some of the groundwork for online computer gaming popularity after 2000, but there was still room left to explore in the mobile market. In 2007 it was the iPhone that popularized smartphones in the mainstream, and like when computers first went online, smartphones needed apps and games to demonstrate to the public what was possible in interactive entertainment. Online casinos again played this part, translating well to smartphone interfaces and introducing a new generation of players to the convenience of internet-based play.
Source: Pixabay
The high connectivity standards available around the world today can make it difficult for us to appreciate just how far online entertainment has come. From the early days when getting online at all was a complicated task, modern digital systems have made internet experiences seamless and open enough for anyone.
To better appreciate where we are in the 2020s, it’s important to recognize the contributions of older systems. Online poker is just one part of this drive forward, both in traditional desktop and laptop gaming and the newer landscape of mobile interactive entertainment. As we enter the age of augmented and virtual reality gaming we have to wonder, how long until these experiences become standard, and will poker affect the popularity of these systems as it’s done in generations prior?