Planet Poker

Planet Poker was the first real-money cardroom for playing online poker, opening in 1998.

Without an existing model to follow, Planet Poker founder Randy Blumer was entering uncharted territory. During the initial launch and testing phases in late 1997, Planet Poker started to build a customer base, placing advertisements in Card Player magazine. By the time the first real money table opened, a handful of customers were ready to play.

On 1 January 1998, after several months of planning and preparation, Planet Poker dealt a $3–$6 game of Texas hold 'em poker. As days turned to weeks, the small group of customers began to grow and the poker games started to run longer. Sometime in February 1998, a game continued through the night with enough players rotating in and out the game that it carried all the way through to the next evening. It was one of the major milestones in the history of online poker.

By the early summer of 1998, Planet Poker had amassed a following, and games regularly ran around the clock. Game selection was increased to meet the demand of the steady stream of new players. For the remainder of 1998, Planet Poker continued to grow, but as with any rapidly growing business, new challenges emerged. Credit card payments were accepted to allow customers an easy means of getting money into and out of the game. However, by far the largest challenges were technical in nature, and problems often required days to fully resolve. The Internet itself was in its infancy and was often plagued by geographic outages and poor connections. Nearly all the players were using dial-up Internet access.

Technical problems were further compounded by the growing demand for more features and enhancements. The site lacked many of the necessary playing features, and the backend capability did not adequately manage the cardroom. Planet Poker assembled an in-house team to address the backend issues, but the playing features were more of a challenge.

Implementation of new playing features required changes to the core game software and Planet had to rely on the third-party supplier to make them. Recognizing the importance of getting these features in place, agreements were renegotiated with the supplier that provided the software provider with generous payments to implement needed changes. However, the software supplier had mixed business interests, and the pace of developing the changes was less than required to keep pace with the evolving online poker industry. Maintaining a relationship with the software supplier soon became a time consuming effort that diverted resources from other aspects of the business.

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Wikipedia