How much money does advertising make?

How do poker sites make their money and pay for huge advertising campaigns?

• I play poker with friends and enjoy the game a lot. Yesterday I joined a site and played for quite a few hours. Its a cool game and ,despite the fact I also like the socializing involved, I knew playing online was going to give me a real buzz. I also love statistics and probabilities, two subjects that were integrated into my University course. After yesterday's online poker session I have serious questions about whether its a con or not and the integrity of the people that develop the sites. I came accros a number of strange hands that seemed particularly suspicious. It goes without saying that everybody knows that there can be very unlikely occurrences that do occur from time to time, but not regularly. I started to seriously wonder whether or not I was playing against REAL people or not. Whether the characters I was playing against were simply computer programmes loaded with algorithms and probabilistic analysis, if the cards dealt were part of the program and if the only REAL thing was the money coming out from your bank account. All the sites have training games were you play just to practice at a table against characters in a tutorial program. Much like a videogame, and no one expects these characters to be real. So I am not so sure the ones in the real money game are all that different from the ones in the tutorial. In the one I play there is a chat box and I decided to ask 1 or 2 simple questions and never got a reply. Once I got a random sentence being uttered from one of the characters. I tried this again in other rooms because I thought it would help me to understand and Nothing. For this reason I cam on internet today to see what other people are thinking and if they are asking the same questions. Well, it appears that a lot of other people are asking the same questions and the usual replies come from people who have a poker site advertised to their profile. The main reason these enthusiasts put down is the lack of ability of those who question the way the sites work. To answer this, I am no star, and these doubts stem from an impression I got and have nothing to do with level of expertise. I saw a lot of people's questions and doubts being brushed away with the claim that they were weak poker players and the good ones don't complain because they are making a living out of it. The ones that are making thousands a weak out of it are testament of the site not being a con. I, unfortunately have never met any of those people, but I have read many stories about them banded about the sites and on television. I have read a lot of comments about people saying that the sites would actually be earning less money if the poker was "juiced up". People claiming that all the programs allowing the site to run and all the fake players to function, along with keeping all the staff from declaring the truth would simply cost too much money and not be worth it. That just does not make any sense at all. You can buy any poker game for the PC for less than 10 pounds (no more than 18 dollars) and there are thousands of characters in the game that play against you, much like humans do. And as far as keeping all the employees quiet, if Jimmy Wales manages to run all of Wikipedia with only a few helpers I think an online poker site may be able to function quite well with just a few associates who put the site together working on it, along with a couple of technicians. And if you are earning a lot of money thanks to your verging-on-hoax creation then you are not going to be running around telling everybody and risking jeopardizing your money making invention. I have not sayed the name of the site I played because I would imagine them all to work in very similar ways. I am not saying I know it is a scam but I am saying that I am very suspicious and I am not convinced with the responses people get when they raise questions. And if the puggy (slot machine) in the bar I used to work in while at Uni had a lever inside regulating the amount of winning that would be guaranteed, making it more or less difficult for the drunk people putting money into it to win then I would be surprised if there is not a similar process behind online poker and all the hype the goes with it which guarantees millions. Because of these reasons where I am not entirely sure I am playing against real people and that winning or not depends entirely on skill I don't think I'll be playing on these sites again

• Answer:

  Was there actually a question in there? Poker sites makes tons of money, the same way a casino makes from poker. But I have no idea what else you were rambling about. You are playing against real people... you weren't specific, but often people play at more than one table at once, so they won't be chatting.