No limit Texas Holdem is a great game that has gained great notoriety since 2003.  Thanks to a guy named Chris Moneymaker (no joke!) who won the World Series of poker, the game has sky rocketed to new heights.  By the way, the cost to enter a World Series event is $10,000 dollars. It cost Moneymaker $25.00 dollars – he entered a satellite poker game on a poker web site and won a 10,000 dollar seat.

Now, that’s a great story.

There were approximately 800 people entered in the world series of poker in 2003.  The total for people entered in 2006 was over 8000 people – some jump in attendance, right?  And the winners of the World Series of poker – Greg Raymer in 2004,  Joseph Hachem  in 2005 and Allan Gold in 2006, all won their seats from poker web sites. As a matter of fact, half the people entered in 2006 World Series of poker came from satellite tournaments won on line -  that’s over 4000 people.

Unfortunately, I’m expecting a drop in attendance in ’07 to the World Series event, and that’s because President Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 which prohibits people from the U.S. to gamble online.  If the banks get caught dealing with these gambling sites they will be fined and possibly face jail time. Listen, I’m sure people will come up with ingenious ways to still be able to play poker online  and win seats to all these World series events.

By the way, you can still play poker online, you just can’t play for money. Listen – tax it, regulate it,  police it -whatever.  But don’t ban it!  People are doing far worse things in this world than playing poker.

We’ll see what happens, in the mean time I hope to see you at the tables.