With the upcoming Pokerstar's SCOOP Online Poker Tournament, as the S of SCOOP is for Spring, it set me to wondering if you could argue that Online Poker was environmentally friendly.

On the one hand you have thousands of people sitting in their own homes playing poker. This means they are not going out in their cars to travel, at times, long distances, to live venues such as casinos, so this cuts down on the potential for pollution for car journeys.

On the other hand you have large server farms running all the online poker systems (such as Pokerstars) which can require a large amount of power and electricity to function. As to the environmental impact of this, it is obviously not so easy to gauge as it is dependant on the companies that provide these server facilities and if they get their power from power companies that in turn use environmentally friendly power generation.

With the slow, but inevitable move towards power companies using more environmentally friendly power generation, you could argue that any negative impact of this will reduce over time, so, personally speaking, I would say, yes, online poker is environmentally friendly, or at least heading that way.