vnunet.com feature: Smart money backs online poker

Meanwhile, the cards keep being dealt and the players keep stacking their virtual chips, and with so many people meeting up in cyber card rooms the technology that handles it has to be up to scratch.

Tapper believes this to be one of the factors for poker's popularity with internet players.

"You can have 20,000 people sat down on a site playing against each other anywhere in the world, and one central server is providing them with banking, dealing and all the rest of it," he explained.

"It takes less than a twentieth of a second for a message to get from Aberdeen to our servers in Gibraltar and back again, and obviously that has opened it up.

"The systems are very powerful and we've now got to a point where we just need to add hardware and scale up."

So where does the market go from here? Tapper feels that there are still unexplored avenues for the game, especially as no-one expected the internet version to be leading the way.

"I started at Ladbrokes right at the beginning of our online experiment back in 1999 and everyone thought it would be interactive TV, and it wasn't. Then they thought it would be mobile phones and it really wasn't. It might still be mobiles, but not yet.

"But the internet has been huge. Even though we're the world's biggest bookmaker, [in our online business] it is poker that has really exploded."