Fascinating facts about online poker

Online poker has been around for many years, and we are seeing a huge growth in popularity of poker in India.

If you want to play online poker in India, there are many poker sites to play at, but how much do you know about the game itself?

Take the starting hands for instance, most people know at AA is the best, but surely one of the worst is 10 2?

Well, not for double WSOP Main Event champion Doyle Brunson who won the big one not just once but twice using that hand – in successive years as well!

He beat Jesse Alto head-s up to win the 1976 WSOP Main Event and then followed it up by winning the 1977 version against Gary Berland heads-up. Both times, the final hand saw him all-in with 8 2 – no wonder it is his favourite hand!

How about playing in a poker game that lasted slightly longer than the average session time?

Well, back in 1881 a game began in the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona in the USA.

Maybe the name of the town was about right as the game lasted an incredible 8 ½ years! Yep, you read that right – it continued day and night for a total of 8 years, 5 months and 3 days, making it officially the longest running poker game in history. Buy-in cost $1,000 – which back then was a ridiculously high amount of money – and it is thought that at least $10m changed hands.

Some of the players to take part included Doc Holliday and George Hearst, and the game only ended when the theatre was flooded.

Plenty of other famous people like a game or 2 as well.

Did you know that Ben Affleck once won $356K and entry to the WPT Championship? Or that 2 US presidents had rather differing fortunes, Warren G Harding managed to lose a full set of presidential china in a game at the White House one time whilst Richard Nixon won so much playing poker when he was in the navy that it funded his first campaign for the House of Representatives!

Then there was Andrei Karpov who ran out of money whilst playing a game – so he gambled his wife. He lost and she ended up leaving him for the winner anyway as she was so mad; the creator of the World Series of Poker was a convicted murderer; talking of the WSOP, it has never been won with AA as the final hand, although it has been involved in the final hand of the tournament twice – both times it lost; you have more chance of getting struck by lightning than of getting dealt a natural Royal Flush in the first 5 cards, and there are over 2.5 million possible 5-card hands you can get dealt.

Finally, poker pro Tom Dwan started playing with a $50 birthday present that his dad gave him one year – he won over $5,000,000 in the next 4 years.

If you want to try and turn a little into a lot, why not head to Poker Stellar, one of India’s leading online Poker sites, and have a go?Online poker