Instead, it will share income with on-line betting companies that sponsor televised tournaments. The poker boom has been compared to the dotcom boom, but The Poker Channel's chairman and principal investor, Justin Byam Shaw, an Oxford classics graduate and media venture capitalist, does not believe interest in the card game will wane quickly. He said: "Of course the comparison makes me nervous but the coda to that is that there are many very successful large businesses that came through the crash." And Mr Nieboer says the boom has barely started. "I would expect to see four or five copycat poker channels in the next 18 months.