So You Wanna Play Online Poker?

We have all seen or at least heard of a guy name Chris Moneymaker. If you haven't, maybe you should skip this article. Either way, Chris Moneymaker is Pokerstars.com's poster boy for striking it rich at the main event of the 2003 World Series of Poker by taking down the tournament and winning a seven figure prize in the process. The cost to get in to the tournament was paid for by winning a smaller satellite tournament that paid for his ten thousand dollar entry fee.

The same feat was followed up next year in 2004 by a fellow named Greg Raymer. Raymer, an amateur like Moneymaker, played on the Pokerstars.com site and won his entry fee for the WSOP main event and ended up winning millions of dollars.

2005 was an even better year at the WSOP, but only for a guy named Joe Hachem. Hachem, another Pokerstars player, took down a field of over five thousand players and went home with some seven million dollars in prize money.

This year, Pokerstars was able to send over sixteen hundred players to the main event of the World Series of Poker. People qualified for several months in smaller satellite tournaments and freerolls. In the end, three Pokerstars players made it to the final table for a combined total of seven million dollars in winnings. First place took home twelve million.

So how do you get a piece of the poker pie?

It's pretty easy these days with the abundance of online poker rooms.

Before you go crazy and deposit money at any of these sites you must at least have some sense of how to play cards. One of the benefits of playing online is that the sites all feature free money play. You will at least get the basics out of playing the free money games and eventually you will want to play for real money. 

You can read many articles on the Internet and there are several poker forums as well. Plenty of information can be found just by doing a simple search.