Chris Moneymaker kick-started the first online poker boom in 2003. But a second wave is no longer expected, despite the WSOP going online this year. (Image: ESPN)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nLockdown created a perfect storm for online poker. Hundreds of millions of people across the world were stuck indoors casting around for new forms of entertainment. Sports were canceled. Casinos and live poker rooms were shuttered.<\/p>\n
For the first time in years, new players were coming into the game in significant numbers, while live players had little choice but to get their kicks online.<\/p>\n
The hope was that these new players would stick around when normalcy resumed and that a new online poker boom \u2014 poker\u2019s second wave \u2014 would propel the game back into the limelight, just as the first poker boom of the mid-2000s had made it very nearly, but not quite, mainstream.<\/p>\n
But data suggests this was not a boom but a bubble, now burst. As first reported by Poker Industry PRO, GameIntel found that traffic in the European segregated market \u2014 France, Spain, and Portugal \u2014 had returned to March levels, while the Italian market was down over the past 180 days.<\/strong><\/p>\nGameIntel tracks average daily cash game traffic across the largest online poker sites around the world.<\/p>\n
Shake Your Moneymaker<\/strong><\/h2>\nPoker\u2019s original boom can be traced to Chris Moneymaker\u2019s unlikely World Series of Poker Main Event victory, where he took home $2.5 million in prize money.<\/p>\n
The mild-mannered Tennessee accountant was one of the first amateur players to win the Series, and he was the first to do so by qualifying online, via an $86 satellite tournament on PokerStars. He was also had a headline-grabbing last name.<\/p>\n
His story captured the imagination of millions, helped by the cancellation of the 2004-05 hockey season, which meant the tournament was frequently repeated on ESPN, which needed to plug a void. The resulting online poker snowball became known as the Moneymaker Effect.<\/p>\n
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There were 839 runners in the main event that Moneymaker entered in 2003. The following year, there were 2,576. The year after that, 5,619. By 2006, there were 8,733.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nA tournament whose $10,000 buy-in had once made it inaccessible to the average Joe was now swollen with money from hordes of internet qualifiers.<\/p>\n
Online poker sites were not just feeding the WSOP, but also the WPT, and a host of new televised TV tournaments that drew big audiences because of monster prize pools and improvements in hole cam technology.<\/p>\n