The past two decades a revolution in online gaming has taken place. Not long ago everyone had to take the car, bus, taxi, airplane or whatnot just to get to a casino. This obviously cost alot of money and took alot of time. That's why just as soon the internet revolution started, peoples began to experiment with moving these games online.
At first the most basic games took place. This was text based versions that took place in the most popular chats during that time called IRC. It started with peoples played against eachother by setting up rules, but pretty soon so called "bots" was developed to control the games to make them more fair. A game could look like this: Player 1 wrote "Bet $10", the bot would reply "Player 1 bet $10, player 2 please fold, call or raise", player 2 would then type "Fold" and the hand was done with the computer bot telling both players their current stack sizes.
In the late 90s a few sites started to create stand alone clients with real graphics trying to create a virtual image of live casino rooms. The first such site was PokerRoom.com. Two brothers from Sweden created this together and it became a huge success making them both filthy rich.
Fast forwarding to today the most popular sites are the ones endorsed by most professionals. Another very popular site is the William Hill site, they started out in 1934 and has since the launch of online casino games been hugely successful because of their incredible strong brand with thousands of players online at the same time.
