It announced a poker tournament with a first prize of $1m, bigger than anything seen on the internet.

PartyPoker launched with a stunt that will become a marketing legend. It was only in 2000, after seeing the success of the rival Paradise Poker, that they switched their focus from roulette and blackjack to poker. Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story is that Ms Parasol and Mr Dikshit, pronounced Dixit, were latecomers to poker. More than 70,000 people regularly play simultaneously at PartyPoker and the site has captured half the market. The rake is typically only 1% or 2% of the pot, but a dollar here and a dollar there add up. PartyGaming and its rivals make their money by taking a small slice - the 'rake' - from each hand of poker they host for real money. When players are logging off in San Francisco, they're logging on Singapore and Sydney, and then everywhere from Stockholm to Sidcup. Those statistics illustrate how poker, a game which grew on the 19th-century Mississippi steamboats, is now a 24-hour global phenomenon. That works out at $58,000 an hour, or about £500 a minute.

In the first three months of this year it made $125m, or $1.4m a day.

In three years PartyGaming's pre-tax profits have jumped from $5.8m to $89.2m to $372m. If the valuation seems implausible, look at the numbers. Billionaire status has rarely been achieved so young or so quickly. Ms Parasol, in her late 30s, and her husband, Russ DeLeon, each own 20%, worth £1bn apiece. Its PartyPoker website is the dominant force in the explosive online poker market and the business will be valued at up to $10bn, or a shade over £5bn - only a little less than Marks & Spencer, or the combined value of British Airways and EMI.Īt the top price, Mr Dikshit, who owns 42%, will be worth £2.1bn at the age of 33. The extraordinary result of that meeting was seen yesterday when PartyGaming, the company they created, announced plans to float on the London stock market.

Ruth parasol gibraltar