Poker & facebook: the Perfect Combo.

In the not so distant past, 10 years or so, online poker seemed like an insignificant pastime, with little attraction for anyone. But today, you can play on your computer, on your television or even on your mobile phone. Now, you can also play poker on the social networking site facebook!

Since January 2008 facebook has been offering free games of poker, which you can find in the categories ‘Games' and ‘Chat', the most popular being Ujogo poker. Entering into a round of poker does not cost anything, but allows you to win prizes after you have accumulated enough points. Players gain points simply by playing, joining monthly tournaments, inviting friends to play or by actually winning the pot. A $100 freeroll tournament is also available at Ujogo which they run as a promotion for their site. At first these points and prizes were available to Americans only, but now it is available to the rest of Europe. The poker site PurePlay also offers cash prizes to its players.

Because they consist of free programmes, the arrival of poker games with money prizes on facebook introduces new players to the poker industry in general, so various poker sites are using facebook as a form of publicity, but one where everybody wins.

Following a study undertaken by Ujogo, an estimated 30 million adult poker players participate in online poker games. The most popular form of poker played on facebook is Texas Hold'EM, developed by Eric Schiermeyer and Mark Pincus, which in 2008 has a total of 452, 381 members, but many more must surely have joined the group by now.

Launched in 2004, by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, the facebook portal, dedicated to young, affluent adults, and with a membership of more than 60 million in January 2007, is one of the most, if not the most, popular social networking site currently available on the Internet. With 250, 000 new members joining up every day, its population doubles every six months.

Like all self-respecting online social networking sites, facebook allows people to enter into online relationships with other members of its site in relation to their geographical locations, professions or signing in to the same groups (but also your personal friends in real-life). ‘Friends' communicate using different applications, which are often developed by the sites users themselves, such as passing virtual drinks, poker, groups, quizzes, games...in fact, facebook is the world's number one site for the percentage and volume of uploaded photos and their sharing thereof.

Facebook is also a vast space for virtual multi-player gaming. For example, 500,000 members have subscribed to the joys of the game Scrabulous, a clone of the game Scrabble, which was developed by two Indian information technology technicians, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla.

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