2CardsCollege's History of Poker: UB, Party, and Stars
Last time we told you about the battle between Planet Poker and Paradise Poker as well as the meteoric rise and painful fall of PokerSpot. The year 2000 was coming to an end, and so was the “stone age” of online poker. Today’s grinders might have not even heard of the above-mentioned mastodons. Today, 2CardsCollege will talk about how the brands that are well known to us nowadays came into the industry.
The first to do battle with Paradise Poker was Ultimate Bet, created by ieLogic. At UB, the lobby was first introduced, which resembled modern ones, and regular SNGs and MTTs were scheduled.
The “soul” of the project was Russ Hamilton, the 1994 WSOP Main Event champion. Nowadays, Russ is one of the most despised characters in the poker community, but we’ll talk about that soon.
At the time, Russ was a respected member of the poker world. He involved Phil Hellmuth in the project, who became the first Team Pro in UB’s history.
UB gained momentum fast. In the beginning of 2001, Party Gaming, which had been operating as online casino since 1997, joined the game with PartyPoker. The company was run by Ruth Parasol, daughter of the American businessman of Hebrew extraction Richard Parasol.
In August 2001, together with her husband Russ DeLeon (a businessman and a lawyer with a Harvard diploma) and two Indian IT pros, Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava, she launched PartyPoker. The image of the company and her personal consultant was Mike Sexton, who currently is an announcer and brand ambassador for the World Poker Tour.
The PartyPoker Million series ran, the Main Event of which guaranteed $1 million. Nowadays, these figures are old hat (for example, the Sunday Million is held weekly), but at the time it was an unthinkable prize. The PR stunt proved to be brilliant. In no time, Party gathered a pool of users and has remained one of the most successful poker sites to this day.
September 11, 2001 saw the start of the first beta version of PokerStars. The company was founded by Israeli programmer Isai Scheinberg, who was an employee at the Canadian office of IBM. He immediately connected his son, Mark to the project, who later headed the family business. Currently, Forbes estimates Mark’s fortune at $4.1 billion.
At first, the games on PokerStars were play money, and the first real money table was introduced three months later. PokerStars focused on quality software and tournament diversity, but the site lacked the financial backing and PR muscle of Party. For example, the first big МТТ at PokerStars was a $215 tournament with $50,000 guaranteed.
That’s how three monsters entered the world of online poker, but the real action started a bit later in 2001. Paradise Poker remained the leader and was the site where players devotedly played their favorite game, Limit Hold’em. However, this epoch was coming to an end and the year 2002 changed the world of online poker forever. But we’ll talk about it in the next part of our series of articles.
