The Unlikely Founders of PartyPoker: From Porn to Poker Empire

Ruth Parasol, the founder of PartyPoker, was born in San Francisco in 1967. She graduated from Marin Academy in 1984, received a business management degree from the University of San Francisco in 1988, and became a doctor of jurisprudence in 1992. Ruth Parasol moved to Silicon Valley in the mid-90s and became one of the first women businessmen in the IT field. Her initial ventures were in phone sex businesses, later transitioning to online pornography.

Ruth Parasol hired Anurag Dikshit, a 25-year-old Indian programmer, to develop software for online casino games, with a focus on poker. Anurag Dikshit and Ruth Parasol launched the online casino Starluck in 1998, followed by PartyGaming in 1999. Vikrant Bargava, a friend of Dikshit, joined PartyGaming as the marketing director in 2000. Ruth Parasol and Russ DeLeon, a Harvard-trained lawyer, became co-owners of PartyGaming in 2001 and married in 2003.

PartyPoker launched on August 1, 2001, and quickly became the largest online poker site. PartyPoker's first major tournament had a $8,000 buy-in with a $1 million prize, an idea conceived by Anurag Dikshit. PartyPoker became the first online poker room to advertise on American television. In 2005, PartyGaming went public on the London Stock Exchange, with 23% of its shares up for sale. The UIGEA law, passed in October 2006, prohibited banks from processing transactions to gaming sites, severely impacting PartyPoker.