PKR.com (also PKR) was an Alderney, UK-based [2] online poker room that allowed users to play poker in a virtual reality setting. [3] The site customized 3D graphics and player character animation during poker play. [4] The characters incorporated body language, expressions, chip tricks and poker tells to make the game more realistic. [1]
PKR was founded by Jez San [2] and launched in June 2006. [1] At its peak it grew to more than 5 million users and 15,000 users playing simultaneously. [3] In August 2007, PKR signed a license agreement making Playtech their exclusive provider of casino software. [5]
In response to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, PKR barred US-based players. [2]
In April 2007 PKR partnered with UBT to launch Poker and BlackJack tournaments at Sea from both sites.
In November 2008, PKR held its first in-person poker tournament in London, and 150 players from several countries participated. [6]
In December 2009 PKR partnered with Nuts and Loaded men's magazines [7] which saw the launch of branded poker rooms within PKR's 3D poker client as well as Nuts and Loaded avatar items which players could wear at the tables.
In February 2016 PKR gave up its independent status after ten years and became a skin on the Microgaming Poker Network (MPN). [8]
PKR ceased operations in May 2017. [9] [10] In July 2017, PokerStars agreed to a deal with bankruptcy administrators to acquire some of the PKR's assets and in doing so will reimburse 60,000 PKR players 100% of their final balances. [11] [12]
In November 2017, Maltese online casino Videoslots purchased the technology assets from the PKR portfolio. [13]
Cheating in poker is any behavior outside the rules of poker that is intended to give an unfair advantage to one or more players.
Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It has been partly responsible for a huge increase in the number of poker players worldwide. Christiansen Capital Advisors stated online poker revenues grew from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion in 2005, while a survey carried out by DrKW and Global Betting and Gaming Consultants asserted online poker revenues in 2004 were at $1.4 billion. In a testimony before the United States Senate regarding Internet Gaming, Grant Eve, a Certified Public Accountant representing the US Accounting Firm Joseph Eve, Certified Public Accountants, estimated that one in every four dollars gambled is gambled online.
Online casinos, also known as virtual casinos or Internet casinos, are online versions of traditional casinos. Online casinos enable gamblers to play and wager on casino games through the Internet. It is a prolific form of online gambling.
Jeremy Elliott "Jez" San OBE is an English game programmer and entrepreneur who founded Argonaut Software as a teenager in the 1980s. He is best known for the 1986 Atari ST game Starglider and helping to design the Super FX chip used in Star Fox for the Super NES.
888 Holdings plc, formerly Virtual Holdings Limited, is an international sports betting and gambling company. It owns brands such as 888casino, 888poker, 888sport, Mr Green, and William Hill. Business operations are led from its headquarters in Gibraltar, alongside satellite offices in Bucharest, Ceuta, Leeds, London, Malta, Sofia, and Tel Aviv. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
PokerStars is an online poker cardroom. It is the largest real money online poker site in the world, controlling over two-thirds of the total online poker market, and can be accessed through downloadable poker clients for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS.
Full Tilt Poker is an Irish online poker card room and online casino that opened in June 2004. Formerly privately owned by Tiltware, LLC and later by the Rational Entertainment Group, the site was acquired by The Stars Group in a deal where Amaya acquired all of Rational's assets, including PokerStars. A statement by Amaya said the takeover would not affect the activities of Full Tilt Poker. The deal was closed on August 1, 2014.
Playtech plc is a gambling software development company founded in 1999. The company provides software for online casinos, online poker rooms, online bingo games, online sports betting, scratch games, mobile gaming, live dealer games and fixed-odds arcade games online. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, formerly known as Betandwin, is an Austrian online betting brand acquired by Entain PLC. The group operated under international and regional licences in countries like Gibraltar, the Amerindian reserve of Kahnawake (Canada), and Belize; and Germany, Italy, Mexico, Croatia, Austria, France, and the United Kingdom in Europe. Bwin offered sports betting, poker, casino games, and soft and skill games, with most revenue coming from poker and sports betting. Bwin had over 20 million registered customers in more than 25 core markets. Competence centres were located in Vienna, Stockholm, and Gibraltar.
Shirley Rosario is a poker player and former website owner. Born in San Pedro, California, she grew up in Torrance, California and currently resides in Downey.
Kaneva, LLC is a privately owned American video game company based in Atlanta, Georgia and founded in 2004 by Christopher Klaus and Greg Frame. Kaneva was a 3D Virtual World that supported 2D web browsing, social networking and shared media.
The World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) is the first expansion effort of World Series of Poker-branded poker tournaments outside the United States. Since 1970, participants had to travel to Las Vegas if they wanted to compete in the World Series of Poker (WSOP). Although the WSOP held circuit events in other locations, the main tournaments, which awarded bracelets to the winners, were exclusively held in Las Vegas. The inaugural WSOPE, held in 2007, marked the first time that a WSOP bracelet was awarded outside Las Vegas. From its inception to the 2013 tournament, players from 19 countries — USA (10), France (4), UK (3), Denmark (3), Canada (2), Norway (2), Portugal (2), Italy (2), Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, Spain, New Zealand, Sweden, Tunisia, Switzerland, Australia, Italy and Finland — have won bracelets.
Boss Media AB, with its main headquarters in Växjö, Sweden, was a developer of software and systems for digitally distributed gambling entertainment. Boss Media was publicly traded on the Stockholm Stock Exchange from 1999 to 2008, when GEMed bought the company and rebranded it to GTECH Gaming.
Cereus Poker Network was an online poker network comprising Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The site is now insolvent and not processing player withdrawals. Cereus is owned by a private company, Blanca Games. Blanca Games bought all Network assets in August 2010 from Tokwiro Enterprises. The Cereus network was one of the world's ten largest online poker cardrooms prior to losing the majority of its player base in the wake of the April 15, 2011 online poker indictments.
Poker tools are a variety of software or web-based applications that allow the statistical analysis of poker players, games or tournaments.
PokerTracker Software, LLC is the name of a poker tool software company that produces the PokerTracker line of poker tracking and analysis software. PokerTracker's software imports and parses the hand histories that poker sites create during online play and stores the resulting statistics/information about historical play into a local database library for self-analysis, and for in-game opponent analysis using a real-time Head-up display.
United States v. Scheinberg, No. 1:10-cr-00336 (2011), is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus, and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering to process transfers to and from their customers. A companion civil case, United States v. Pokerstars, et al., 11 Civ. 2564 (2011), included Full Tilt and Cereus, Ultimate Bet, Oldford Group, Rational Entertainment Enterprises, and many others as defendants and sought the recovery of forfeiture equalling approximately $3 billion in assets belonging to the companies. After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers. Three years after the start of the poker boom in 2003, the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for illegal online gambling a crime; however, the defendant companies remained in the U.S. market in the belief that the law did not cover poker. A former payment processor for the companies turned state's evidence after initially being charged with violating UIGEA himself. On September 20, the civil suit was amended claiming individual fraud by Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, and Rafael Furst.
The Amateur Poker Association & Tour (APAT) is an organisation founded in 2006 and is Europe's largest organisation for recreational poker players, with a membership of over 20,000 players.
Mike Kim is a professional poker player and the founder of the Asian Poker Federation and MK Global Management Solutions Inc., a gaming service provider based in Metro Manila, Philippines.
