"The World's Largest Online Poker Tournament is Gaining Popularity"

Las Vegas is probably the name that is most likely to come to mind when you think of gambling. Well, it is also home to the world’s largest poker tournament, the World Series of Poker. This tournament draws more than 35,000 tournament players as well as more than one hundred million dollars in prizes. The World Championship of Online Poker, however, is not hosted in Las Vegas. It is also a large poker tournament, but it is operated in San Jose, Costa Rica.

The World Championship of Online Poker is set to take place in September. It is an annual online poker championship that is hosted by the online gambling business, PokmyStars.com. This latest is the fourth annual championship up until now. Although it may be true that the World Championship of Online Poker is somewhat miniscule when compared to the World Series of Poker, the amount of money involved in the tournament is nothing to laugh at. Fifteen individual poker events make up the tournament, including a final event of no-limit hold ‘em. The tournament is expected to draw more than 10,000 players. The prize pool for the final event starts out at 2.5 million dollars. In comparison, the championship playoff in Las Vegas starts at more than fifty million dollars in prizes.

The World Championship of Online Poker comes in second in size only to the World Series of Poker, even with the large differences in the number of participants and prize money. And it is gaining in popularity. According to the World Championship of Poker spokesman Nolan Dallas, the online tournament is not aiming to compete with the Las Vegas tournament, yet the prize money for the online championship ranks ninth worldwide. Dallas says that entirely different demographics are involved and that the online tournament attracts a lot of those people who are not able to travel to Las Vegas.

Dallas says that the main attraction of the online tournament is its convenience. It is much easier, Dallas says, to log on and play from Belgium or Baton Rouge. There's no airfare and no hotel room involved, and you don’t even have to get dressed or tip the dealer.

There are strong similarities between how the two tournaments are run. But there are also significant differences. As with the World Series of Poker, with the online tournament poker games are held daily and winners of each event receive a gold bracelet. It is the cost of the final events that make the main difference, along with the speed with which the games are played and the audience participation. While the cost of the final event in Las Vegas can reach $10,000 or more, the online final game costs are $2,500. In addition, online games can be played twice as fast as casino games and at least forty percent of the players are not from the United States. In this respect, Dallas says, it has the broadest international spectrum of any major poker tournament. This is possible because people are not required to travel, she said.