My guess would be during the US poker boom around 2003ish. Texas Hold Em had for quite a while been the variant of poker used by the largest tournaments, and du

My guess would be during the US poker boom around 2003ish. Texas Hold Em had for quite a while been the variant of poker used by the largest tournaments, and during that boom a lot more people learned about competitive poker and started playing it online. As for why Texas Holdem is the most popular variant for betting poker, it’s a variant that is not too complex, offers a lot of opportunities to infer information about other player’s hands due to minimal private information compared to other variants, and has multiple opportunities for betting. It works well from both a competitive and watchability stand point.