Some people really like to gamble, and they always have. According to Open-Site, “anthropologists find solid implications that gambling took place within a large portion of the greatest societies to have ever existed. Dating back to 2300 BC, gambling artifacts have been recovered from some of the oldest civilizations including China, India, Egypt and Rome.”

But while gambling has always been popular, it may never have been as popular as it is today. There’s strong evidence to suggest that the Internet is to blame, and calls for online gambling to be eliminated as a result.

The latest example of this growing interest in gambling, and the Internet’s role in the activity, is the recently completed World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, which attracted a record 8,773 entrants, up from the previous best of 5,619 set in 2005. They were competing for US$154 million in prize money, which is an increase from the 2005 sum of $103 million.

I don’t like to gamble, due mainly to the fleecing I endured from a gentleman named Dave Scharf when we were teenagers. After losing $15 a few too many times to his vastly superior poker skills, I stormed away from the table and have remained absent ever since.

As for Dave, he was just getting started and is now one of the top poker players in Canada and has competed in a number of WSOP Main Events. Ironically, despite killing my desire to gamble, Dave is also responsible for my current interest in the WSOP because I enjoyed reading his blog postings from the event.

After recovering from the shock of learning how much money Dave was prepared to lose at the poker tables, one item that caught my attention was his observation regarding the impact the Internet has had on the WSOP: eight of the 10 players at his table had qualified through one of the on-line poker sites.

According to a recent piece in Newsfactor Magazine Online, Dave can blame his company on Chris Moneymaker, who “turned his $40 investment in an online game into $2.5 million for winning the 2003 World Series of Poker, [giving] anyone with a modem and a fantasy the idea that he might be the next Virtual Amarillo Slim.” At this year’s WSOP Main Event, for example, it’s estimated that 4,000 of the 8,773 players won their $10,000 stake on an overseas-based Internet poker site.

The sites are not based in the U.S. because the Justice Department says that playing poker for money online is illegal, although there are estimates that 15 million U.S. citizens are prepared to break the law by doing just that.

Online gambling is a controversial topic, with proponents, like poker professional and author of multiple books on the game Mike Caro, going so far as to say in the Newsfactor article that: “They’re trying to cut off the United States while the whole world is bonding around Internet poker. Here our representatives are criticizing China for trying to cut off access to activities and information on the Internet, and we are trying to do the same thing.

“I think this is an issue of freedom. Anybody who loves the Internet ought to be concerned with this.”

While Caro’s rallying cry is way over the top, the issue is worth considering for people who are interested in the Internet and its impact on business and government regulations. The Internet makes it easier to do things that people enjoy, and there are always entrepreneurs seeking to profit from that simple fact. In most cases, government stays out of the way and lets the market determine winners and losers.

When it comes to gambling, there are people like me, who don’t like the thought of losing thousands of dollars in the hope of winning millions and are happy to use the Web to live vicariously through people like Dave, who has the wherewithal to lose thousands and the ability to win millions. Unfortunately, there are others who, like our ancestors from 2300 BC, are prepared to lose much more than they can afford by gambling. Those losses are prompting the calls for government action, but it should be apparent that banning online poker won’t work: we like gambling and the Internet too much.