PokerStars: Three billion hands dealt

It happened quietly on Monday. There were no marching bands or Congressional speeches, but it happened nonetheless. PokerStars dealt its three billionth hand. Three billion. That's getting close to rivaling McDonalds hamburgers. That's a lot of anything.

On the receiving end of some of those three billion dealt hands are several PokerStars players who have racked up a million hands of their own. A million. Sheesh. Let's consider this for a minute.

Say the idea of online poker disappeared into a black hole about five years ago. Say you still wanted to rack up a MILLION hands. Here's what you would have to do (all numbers being general approximations of the brutual life in a brick and mortar poker room):

1. Convince your tablemates to play at a reasonable pace and get in 30 hands per hour

2. Play for 40 hours a week (yeah, it's a real job, folks)

3. Play for 50 weeks out of the year (two weeks vacation)

Now, do this...play for nearly 17 years.

As one PokerStars employee put it, that's 16.6 years of bad beats condensed into just a few years online. That's a lot of pain to stomach in such a short amount of time.

But, look at it this way: If you can handle that, you can handle anything. And that's what this is all about, right?