PartyPoker launches

PartyPoker was launched in 2001 by the operator later known as PartyGaming, whose founders included Ruth Parasol, Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava. Backed by heavy marketing, it grew rapidly to become the largest online poker room by the mid-2000s.

PartyPoker combined a multiplayer poker platform with aggressive advertising, satellite tournaments and cross-promotion, and rode the surge of interest in poker after 2003. It reached tens of thousands of simultaneous players and generated very large profits, with much of its business coming from United States customers. The operator, licensed in Gibraltar, became the flagship of PartyGaming and set the commercial template for scaling an online poker brand, culminating in its 2005 stock market flotation.

It turned online poker into a mass-market business and became the dominant brand of the boom era.