when did internet poker get popular? 2 years ago?

[NLfool]

the earliest recollection I have is my friend telling me he played a couple of years ago a paradise. When did party, stars, and prima star up? Kinda cringe at all the years I wasted not playing online hehe

[joeypoker789]

Get hold of some of the pokerpulse chart letters and you can get a pretty good picture (you can sign-up via email I believe). A lot of the growth has happened in 2003, probably around the time that Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP. Tournament play really spiked after that event. Two years ago was pretty quite as far as I can remember. ParadisePoker was the entire industry 2 years ago and had about the same number of players as today I believe.

[Cyndie]

it started back in 1998 or so with Planet, Delta and Highlands club with the same software...I started in 2000 about June and Paradise was kind of the new kid on the block, but already such an improvement over Planet software that it was the dominant force. Dragon Poker Inn and PokerSpot were around sometime then too. I never played at PokerSpot, but had some money left at Dragon Poker Inn from the one time I played there.

Party started about two years ago in August, and surprisingly for the innovative software, True Poker has been around for quite a while. I never played at Poker.com, which is now The PokerClub, but played at one of the clones...PokerScape, for a while. That was in the days when they were licensing software for other rooms, but not making aggregate rooms that share the same players and tables...or "skins."

Surprisingly, there are a couple features at those oldest rooms that have been lost in newer ones...Planet had the mouseover for waitlist players and viewers...and also had almost instant access to graphic hand histories much before UB started showing them right away.

Getting "popular" is another matter...to those of us who started playing all the time, it would seem that popular was when we started. /images/graemlins/laugh.gif