International · Poker Network
PokerStars
PokerStars is the largest poker room in the world by traffic, and generally the softest of the major rooms thanks to the sheer scale of its recreational marketing and live tour presence. Rather than running separate third-party skins, PokerStars operates its own regionally licensed instances, with shared liquidity between some of them where regulation allows.
PokerStars was founded in 2001 by Isai Scheinberg and his son Mark, launching first as a play-money site in September before going live for real money that December. It's hard to overstate how much one moment shaped everything that followed: in 2003, an amateur accountant named Chris Moneymaker won a $39 satellite on PokerStars, turned it into a World Series of Poker Main Event seat, and won the whole thing — sparking the "Moneymaker Effect" that arguably created the modern online poker boom, with PokerStars at the center of it.
The company grew into an empire under the Rational Group name before being sold to Canadian firm Amaya Inc. in 2014 for $4.9 billion — at the time, one of the largest gaming acquisitions ever. Amaya later renamed itself The Stars Group, which was in turn acquired by Flutter Entertainment (owner of FanDuel, Paddy Power, and Betfair) in 2020.
Through all the corporate reshuffling, PokerStars has stayed the single biggest room in online poker — a scale advantage that keeps its marketing budget, live tour presence, and recreational player base larger than almost anyone else's.