You may have read in poker forums or tips from the pros about keeping track of your hourly rate when you play poker. The idea behind this is to help the professional player (rounder) understand where he plays best, playing which poker game, and under what structure in regards to limits, tournaments and cash games.

Upon knowing such information a player should trend toward where his hourly rate is most profitable. For example, if a player has figured to earn an average of an hour at the local casino playing the 2/4 limit hold’em game and compares it with his hourly rate of multi-tabling online at the .50/1.00 NL hold’em tables on Full Tilt, then barring any other factors this is clearly a decision for playing online that night.

Although poker has been around for hundreds of years, it was only recently that it has started to invade the World Wide Web and has gained a huge following across the globe.

Poker wasn’t the first type of gambling game that has reached the Internet as sportsbooks hold that spot since they have appeared in the mid-90s. Online casinos also started popping out during that time.

Planet Poker was the first gambling room that entered the Internet scene in the year 1998, and it was the sole poker room back then for quite a time. After 1998, a lot of online poker rooms have sprang up. In 1999, Paradise Poker was established. 2001 was a very important year in history since it was the time when Poker Stars and Party Poker entered the scene. Paradise Poker was very dominant until the year 2003. And when Party poker started advertising on television, the successful marketing strategy of its World Poker Tour and Party Poker Million initiatives boosted the site’s growth.

Chris Moneymaker also made top online poker headlines back in those days since he only paid to enter the WSOP after winning from a satellite tournament at Poker Stars. He defeated 839 other players to win what was at the time the biggest World Series of Poker tournament, and came home with the grand prize of .5 million. Also, back in 2003, it became very accessible for people to play online poker, especially for beginners. Because of televised tournaments and Moneymaker’s fame, the revenue that online poker received in 2004 soared.

Multiple programs and software have claimed to possess the ability to predict the outcomes of the RNG or reveal hole cards or even help players cheat in online poker. The reality is, the RNG has little to do with the outcome on the river. Online poker software is easily manipulated if you take an inside look at the algorithms and subroutines used to determine the outcome.

Ever since the advent of online poker, numerous claims have surfaced on methods to crack or hack the software that runs the sites in an effort to help players win through online poker cheats. Most of these claims center on the Random Number Generator (RNG), and exploiting the vulnerabilities of the RNG.

However, the RNG is as impervious as Fort Knox, and attempts to predict or hack a poker site RNG is at best a fantasy. Yet, there are ways to exploit the software used in Online Poker and to actually use these inherent flaws to beat the online poker games.