Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Chris Moneymaker
Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP Main Event.[5] Moneymaker won his seat via a $39 satellite tournament on the PokerStars online poker room. Moneymaker was one of 839 entrants in the 2003 event, an increase of roughly 200 players from 2002 and almost doubling the 393 competitors that played in 1999. By the next year, the field in the 2004 Main Event more than tripled to 2576 players. By the 2006 Main Event, there were 8773 competitors, some 14 times as many as had entered the last 2002 pre-boom Main Event. It is also believed[who?] that the NHL lockout of 2004-05, and the subsequent filling of ESPN air time with poker programming had an impact on the
poker boom.
poker boom. [citation needed] Another view holds that the poker boom was a classic speculative bubble.[6] The end of the boom is generally considered to be October 2006, when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) became law in the United States, and several online poker sites, including the industry leader at the time, Party Poker, left the United States.[7] In the first WSOP following the passage of UIGEA, attendance in the