In the second part of the article series dedicated to online poker history presented to you by 2CardsCollege and PocketFives, we will tell you about the first industry giant and use the phrase “for the first time in history” several more times. Read Part 1.

1998-1999: Planet Poker

Money first came into online poker in 1997. The company 2AM Games established the market by running a client for Texas Hold’em. 2AM was different from IRC-poker in one very important way: one could win hundreds of real dollars for thousands of play money chips. Any player who accumulated 1 million in chips received $100 and then had to start all over again.

Seventeen-year-old Dutch Boyd became one of the best new game regulars. A few years later, he created its own online poker site even though the result of that venture was a bit worse than a complete failure. In 1997, Boyd climbed the 2AM stairs ten times and earned $1,000 in real money. Over time, 2AM developers realized their mistake and set a ceiling of $100 total.

On January 1, 1998, Planet Poker came out of testing. The pioneer poker site collected the first rake (5% with a $3 cap) and users received the first full experience of playing online poker without restrictions or simulations.

The idea belonged to Randy Blumer, 39-year-old University of Alberta graduate, a Bachelor of Engineering Sciences, and a retired Marine Systems Engineer of the Canadian Navy. And, of course, he was an experienced amateur player. Blumer learned about a young and promising type of poker – Texas Hold’em – in 1991 during his first trip to Vegas.

Minimalist layouts, where there is a place for only a small profile picture next to the cards, tables, and figures, were the contemporary reality and the first rule of successful multi-tabling. During the early days of online poker, Randy Blumer and an ASF Software developer did not immediately decide in which direction to develop the client, but the decision they made influenced the appearance and mechanics of online poker.

“We recognized very early on that people wanted to play quickly, and quickly was good from an operator perspective for generating more revenue” – said Blumer in an interview to PokerPlayer365 Magazine in 2014. – “Although you wanted to give them familiarity, you did not need to go full scale with moving avatars and fatter downloads because that just slowed the growth and opportunity to develop the site.”

The Poker Planet client took up about 4 megabytes of memory, but by the standards of the dial-up connection era in 1997, that was some serious size.

Initially on Planet Poker, you could play $3/$6 Limit Hold’em on a single table. The game developed very slowly and was getting interrupted all the time. It took more than a month to gather the pool of players sufficient for continuous action and in February the game did not stop during the whole day for the first time.

Over the next few months, new tables and stakes were added. There appeared a quick-fold button, all-in disconnect protection, and a sort of rakeback. There were even sound effects. The chatting program reacted to «lol» with the laughter from the speakers and to «tyvm» with “Thank you very much” announced famously in Elvis’ voice.

Finally, in addition to the 25% first deposit bonus, players got an opportunity to deposit money using credit cards, and that also meant an easy way to withdraw.

One of the first highly successful regulars on the Planet Poker was Gautam Rao, a training materials specialist and the founder of the Castle Rock Research Corporation. Remarkably, he’s a graduate of that same University of Alberta.

Having made a deposit of $600, Rao quickly won $10,000, but he had to wait for the bank transfer cashout for five weeks. In addition, the bank fee for such a pleasure was about $35 to $45. Deposits with credit cards resolved the issue.

[CAPTION=80%]Gautam Rao was the top regular when some of the today’s online poker stars were not born yet.[/CAPTION]

In one year of playing, Rao earned $280,000. According to the Alberta Venture, in the mid-2000s, he invested $500,000 into a study of the remote studying effect and according to 2+2 users, at the same time he was crushing limit cash on PartyPoker and Ultimate Bet.

Despite Planet Poker’s constant growth, all of the problems could not be resolved. The software was unstable and sometimes the site was out of order for several days. Fortunately for Randy Blumer and his “baby,” the competition among the online poker providers did not yet exist. As the competition eventually appeared with the launch of Paradise Poker, Bloomer had other things to worry about…

The talks about the dishonest RNG emerged with the birth of the game for real money. If today you can find an interlocutor confident in global conspiracy theory, in the late 90s people considered online poker to be worse than suspicious, uncharted territory for hackers!

According to the new Randy Blumer plan, the strengthening of the online poker reputation should have been executed by Mike Caro, the respected professional who had made the mathematical calculations even for Doyle Brunson’s “Super System.” In 1990, Caro wrote Poker Probe, the first analytical poker software for IBM, and in 1997 he vouched for the adequacy of the Planet Poker random number generator while becoming the first professional player on contract in online poker.

[CAPTION=80%]Mike Caro, the face of Planet Poker[/CAPTION]

Blumer gave the post of the security expert to Roy Cooke, and Cooke started studying hand histories in search of suspicious lines.

To put an end to the rumors completely, ASF Software experts shared the algorithm of card shuffling in the open access and five IT security specialists from Reliable Software Technologies found out that instead of the required 4 billion variations, the RNG worked through only 200,000. Then they hacked the system and wrote a program that determined opponents’ hole cards, turn, and river knowing only the cards on the flop.

After the scandals that have been shaking online poker throughout its life, it’s hard to believe that in 1999, Brad Arkin, Frank Hill, Scott Marks, Matt Schmid, and Thomas John Walls published an article entitled “How We Learned to Cheat at Online Poker: A Study in Software Security.”

Out of those who had managed to take advantage of the RNG errors, the maximum damage was inflicted by a user who had won a total of $50,000. The story was covered by CNN and the New York Times and the players affected by the security holes were compensated.

***

According to Frost and Sullivan, by the end of 1998, the online gambling market showed $834.5 million in profit. Planet Poker recovered from the blow and in the fall of 1999 celebrated 2 million hands and a peak of 1,000 simultaneous visitors. But the time for the more serious players was about to come.

By 2002, the game on Planet Poker had almost died. In 2006, when online poker had become more difficult to play in the United States, the site reverted back to the play money.

[CAPTION=80%]The experiment with the installation of the software client ended with the discovery of this 3-Max.[/CAPTION]

In an attempt to adjust to the new legislation, Randy Blumer launched Skillride, a client for play money and paid subscriptions. However, that did not win him any laurels.