The history of the online casino is actually quite interesting and it would not be surprising if it were offered as a higher level history course in about ten or twenty years at some major universities. This is because the history of online casinos are a great study not only in history, but also in historiography, sociology and general trends in social history that historians would love to examine closely. However you view it, the history of the online casino can be usually divided into three parts: the early period, the build up period and the boom period. These three periods are discussed in more detail below.

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The Early Period

The early period with regards to the online casino history simply refers to any period of time that existed before the turn of the century. Online casinos first came around in the late 1990s as part of the dot com boom, but at the same time they were not really helped by it as greatly as most of the other parts of the internet were. What really made the dot com boom important to the online casino was the fact that it allowed it to exist in the first place.

The idea of online casinos and by extension online poker rooms came about because of the period during the dot com boom where everything that existed offline was being tried online. Consequently, online casinos did exist online but they were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now and ultimately they were not really that fun to play on. The servers were fraught with uncertainty and that made the average person very hesitant to trust the casino with their money. While many of these casinos were destroyed by the crashing of the dot com bubble, at the same time many of them survived and started the subsequent build up period that followed the early period in online casino history.

The Build Up Period

The build up period started with the turn of the century and the collapse of the dot com bubble and continued on through the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States and right up to the World Series of Poker in the year 2003. This is not a particular interesting period of time as all that happened during it was for the online casinos to consolidate their holdings, attach themselves to offline gambling agencies and kind of mark time until something happened that would allow them to become resurgent.

This thing was the victory of Chris Moneymaker at the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event. Moneymaker won the event after entering a small satellite online at Poker Stars and parlaying that into a seat at the WSOP Main Event. His victory paved the way for the online poker boom and at the same time that happened, the online casino boom occurred by association.

The Boom Period

This is the period we are in right now. Online casino profits and user numbers are at an all time high and with the repeal of the federal ban on online gambling, the future has nothing but large growth for the average online casino. It is difficult to say when this period will end, but the only thing that is certain is that it will not be ending for quite some time.