The story of online gambling does not start in America or Britain but in Antigua, Bermuda. In 1994 the Government there passed the ‘Free Trade and Processing Zone Act’. The legislation opened the door for online casinos and sports books to operate under licence. Antigua Bermuda is today the words number one location for online casinos. You will find that the vast majority of the sites operate under a licence granted under the ‘Free Trade and Processing Zone Act’. Following this and with advances in software 1996 saw InterCasino become the world’s first online casino to take real money bets. Other Casino sites and sports books quickly followed and they proved very popular. People all over the word were now betting on sporting events and visiting casinos online. Casinos proved that the software could work and the next logical step was to use the knowledge gained and create online Poker. In January 1998 Plant Poker was born. At the time it was the only internet poker room, and it was not the immediate hit that looking at the market today you would think it was. Like any new enterprise, there were obstacles, one the biggest ones being trust. Before Plant Poker they only way people had played poker was face to face, they could see the dealer and the other players. So how can you trust a game is fair were you can't see the dealer or even the deck of cards? Who would you complain to if things went wrong? I mean you can’t just walk down to the casino manager office and complain? Could you? Another big problem was realism, how could you bluff someone if they weren’t sat in front of you? How could you tell if you were being bluffed? What about tells themselves, is there such a thing as an online tell? What turned out to be the biggest problem in the early days was the number of players. It was sometime hard just to get a game going. With only a small number of players, each with their own style of play and each are willing to bet different amounts. Even if there were enough players logged on, getting them onto any one table was difficult. Plant Poker built up a reputation for dealing impeccably with its customers. They examined hands and cheats were barred from the site. Any players that came to them with legitimate grievance were dealt with evenly and fairly. All this helped the site build up a large following. The next big helping hand for internet poker came from the televised games. The relationship between the two mediums became even closer. Online poker rooms started to run tournaments were the prize was to win a seat in a televised poker tournament and even the World Series of poker itself. One such player to benefit from this extraordinary partnership was Chris Moneymaker. Moneymaker entered an online tournament on Party Poker for $40. He then won a seat on a live televised tournament and went on the win the World Series of Poker. His win inspired millions of players to log on. The world of online poker was here to stay or so we thought. Just when it seamed that online gambling was set to become one of the biggest industries on the internet. The operators were hit a devastating blow. In September 2006, the United States congress in their ultimate wisdom decided that they had, had enough of internet gambling. They passed a law restricting online gambling to all United States players. One week after the law was passed the industry lost $7 Billion in value. And while the rest of the world enjoyed the benefits of online casinos and poker rooms, the residents of the greatest superpower on earth were force back onto the green felt.