Play Your Cards Right

"We wanted to try and do something as mass market as we possibly could and videogames are pretty ubiquitous these days. They're the biggest industry out there, give or take, so we saw it as a natural progression of poker software."

Despite huge scepticism from the wider poker world, establishing PKR was a gamble that paid off.

"If you look at the size of the company's annual revenues we're up there relative to videogame developers, and the actual development team is quite small," says Walters.

"We're more like a publisher who makes one game, and we're running it as an MMO. We made £36 million in revenue last year and I guarantee our profit margin is a hell of a lot more than on videogames."

According to Walters, online poker and gaming can happily co-exist. "I think there's room for both, but I think it depends on the kind of videogames you play. Your PS3 and your Xbox players are fairly complementary, I don't think they're mutually exclusive at all. I still haven't finished Read Dead Redemption, though..."

The cross-pollination between poker and gaming also occurs within other areas. Dave Woods, arguably the last truly great editor of the now-defunct PC Zone, left to launch PokerPlayer magazine - describing it as the time as "the best job in the world".

Many professional poker players are also big gamers. Self-confessed "super-nerd" Jimmy 'gobboboy' Fricke takes his handle from the Orcs' nickname for goblins in Warhammer, something that may or may not have helped the young American win $800,000 in a live tournament in Australia.

The most famous gamer-turned-poker pro is Frenchman Bertrand 'Elky' Grospelier, who decamped to South Korea for a few years to earn a living on the Starcraft circuit before discovering poker. He even claims that some of the concepts are similar.

But what are the key concepts of online poker? Is it just a lazy man's version of the real thing?

People often ask how you can play without seeing your opponent but despite Lady Gaga's tuneless paean, the so-called poker face is only a small part of the puzzle. It's essentially a combination of strategy, maths, patience, aggression and the obligatory slice of luck.

And you don't have to bankrupt yourself. Most sites offer freerolls, whereby free tournament entries give you the chance to win a small cash prize and build a bankroll from scratch. (In fact, during the course of writing this feature, I have won 26p from Sky Poker – that's living alright.) You can also practice with play money, but let's be honest - if you're not playing poker for money, you're not playing poker.

Time is probably the largest currency and it's comparable to Football Manager, a game that I personally wasted years of my life on with nothing to show for it apart from taking a pretend team to mid-table obscurity. Conversely, I have wasted years of my life playing online poker and have money in the bank to show for it.

Football Manager supremo Miles Jacobson once admitted to me that his games can't compete with online poker. FM is now something I would only consider playing on an aeroplane (until airborne wi-fi comes in). While I still play the big console games, none of them as yet have presented me with a cheque at the end. That said, Richard Branson's Virgin Gaming is clearly a spin-off of his Virgin Poker model.

Ultimately, videogames and online poker are things to distract us from hurtling to our doom on a dying rock, and both are here to stay. Online poker pro Chris Moorman recently told PokerPlayer magazine: "As a kid I always thought, imagine if you could play videogames for money – it'd be the best thing ever. It's a bit like that." Except better paid.