U.S and Online Gambling
Gambling lore is filled with tales of the lucky novice who walks into a black jack casino and breaks the bank. This year it really happened. The fortunate neophyte is Vikrant Bhargava, who is from Rajasthan, India, and admits that he had never set foot in a casino until recently and still isn't all that fond of gambling. But in a single day in June, he and two colleagues walked away with the poker purse of all time: more than $1 billion in cash. What distinguishes reality from myth is that Bhargava, 32, wasn't playing poker.
He is the marketing director of PartyGaming, a company based in Gibraltar that operates the world's largest online poker site, PartyPoker.com Bhargava joined the firm in 2000 when it was an Internet start-up based in the Dominican Republic that was trying to establish a niche in the then novel world of online gaming. Today PartyPoker boasts that more than a million people have played for money on its site this year, the vast majority of them Americans, who are technically circumventing the law, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Flush with success--and with profit margins of 60%--the firm went public on the London Stock Exchange this summer. The June 27 IPO, which valued PartyPoker at $10 billion, was Britain's biggest this year. Bhargava shared the pot with two other reclusive co-owners: a Net pornographer named Ruth Parasol, who switched from carnality to cards in the late 1990s, and Anurag Dikshit, an Indian software whiz whom Bhargava met when both were students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. They are not three of a kind, but they did cash out about one-fifth of the company. "Poker became a monster," says Bhargava, who sold stock worth $210 million and still retains almost 9% of the firm's equity.
source post:: time.com