The evolution of online poker: How poker has changed since the rarly days of the internet

People who want to play games online have a lot of options now, way more than the first embers of dial-up internet that provided some very unstable games back in the 1990s. Card games remain popular and were first digitalized during the Web 1.0 era – since then we have seen new varieties and evolutions in technology that totally change the way we use the internet, including for gaming.

Poker is a game that has been popular for over a century and has roots in the 17th century. The game was always likely to find its way online, but what has happened between then and now?

People who remember the slow dial-up connections (you couldn’t even use the phone at the same time as playing) will know that things are virtually unrecognizable. There was an interesting journey that included a poker boom as this game found its feet online and became more widely playable.

Now, people can access poker matches online whenever they want to and find different ways to play with more variations of poker than ever before. There are also different interfaces and ways for people to potentially engage with poker tournaments and cash games.

Early Poker Games and Platforms

Like other forms of gaming, the early varieties of poker were usually defined by their basic graphics and sometimes unreliable connections.

Even with these really early platforms, some people did start to play more with the convenience of doing so online and in their own homes. Early online gaming sites would first crop up in the 90s but it was the early 2000s that provided something of a turning point for online poker.

High-speed internet connections became more common, and people were spending more time online. Plus, some stories of players who weren’t pro winning tournaments around the world led to more interest and the surge in internet users created the environment for poker to grow to new audiences.

This era is often referred to as the Poker Boom, a time when a lot of people became interested in the game for the first time (even though it had been around for hundreds of years). There was a lot of poker news and attention and even celeb tournaments people followed closely.

Modern Technology Grows

Technology has changed since the 1990s of course, and we didn’t even have smartphones during the very early online poker options. Cell phones which laid the groundwork for the smartphone revolution were around then (and had been since the 1970s) but they simply didn’t have the functionality to let people play any detailed games. The first cell phone that could connect to the internet was only released in this century!

When smartphones came along and became extremely popular, there were more and more ways that people could potentially play games and the industry mushroomed as a result. Online gaming is worth billions to the economy and though poker is only one area of that, it shows the power of connectivity.

In the 2000s, internet speeds increased and computers became more powerful, online platforms were able to offer more sophisticated games with better graphics and a more advanced playing experience. Plus, one of the main attractions for players was to play in their own homes and not have to travel for the poker experience.

Smartphones and tablets turned online poker into a truly on-the-go activity. Now, a player could be part of a poker game while commuting or waiting for a coffee, and cash games gave people a game they could potentially dip in and out of as they pleased. This shift to mobile devices made online poker even more accessible and added a layer of convenience that the traditional game could never offer. People were no longer tethered to their desktop computers.

Online tournaments became possible as technology grew, also. In the early days, tournaments online were made tough by people dropping out or internet connections not being as reliable – so one of the biggest evolutions in online poker was the introduction and popularization of online tournaments. There are now a lot of online tournaments that take place regularly and players may have the option to sign up for a tournament at short notice, something that didn’t necessarily happen in the past.

Conclusion

Poker has been on a journey since those clunky first sites of the 90s. The newer options are likely written in different coding languages and the devices used to play poker are unrecognizable!

The tech revolution since the 1990s has been fast – even smartphones are a relatively new technology in the grand scheme of the history of the internet and gaming. Though poker has been around for much longer than the last few digital decades, this historic card game has been through more changes in that time than ever before.