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Ruth Parasol Parlays Poker And Porn Into Billions
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Author: Marc Weinberg
Ruth Parasol is worth a lot more than Oprah, in fact today she is far and away the wealthiest working woman in the world. Wow! Who is she? Bear with me for some more annoying alliteration - Parasol is a pampered princess who has parlayed porn and poker into a fortune, thanks mainly to the explosion of online poker in general and Party Poker in particular.
Parasol's story is very interesting. Her father is "Rude" Rick Parasol, a former Holocaust survivor who made a fortune in the USA thanks to phone-sex lines. Daddy Parasol is worth twice as much as his daughter, so like the Donald and other glamorous billionaires it helps to start out as the child of a billionaire.
As a teenager, Ruth, who was nicknamed "Ruthless Ruthie" at her private high school, Marin Academy, was given a "coming-of-age" present by her dad, a share of the phone sex business! She did well with the opportunity (a head for business?) and quickly saw that Internet porn was the way to go. Parasol was one of the main players behind the Internet Entertainment Group, one of the biggest online porn companies in the 1990s.
Parasol sold her interest in IEG, who were well known as pioneers in the industry for supplying live video feeds on the Internet. Later on IEG would become well known for distributing the Pamela Anderson / Tommy Lee sex tape, which you and I both know you've seen by now. The highlight of the video is when Tommy shows that he is one of those rare, talented individuals who could have all his limbs amputated and still be able to steer a boat.
But Parasol had bigger fish to fry. She found a brilliant software developer, the even more brilliantly named Anurag Dikshit (I swear I'm not making any of this up), a computer geek who had never set foot in a real casino, to build online casino and later online poker software. For those of you who complain that online poker does not resemble real-world poker you have a bone to pick with Dikshit, because he ended up building Party Poker based only on a couple of poker textbooks that he read, a remarkable achievement. Along with her husband, who is a lawyer, and a fourth partner, Vikrant Bhargava, they started PartyPoker.com.
To top it all, Ruth Parasol is said to be drop-dead-gorgeous. If anyone can locate an image of her please email it to us and we'll gladly put it on the site. I for one would be curious to see what she looks like. We might have to wait because Ruth shuns the public eye, and although the LA Times has just come out with a story about her, and her rise to fame through Vice (thoroughly salacious), she unsurprisingly declined to comment or be interviewed for the article. So no accompanying picture :(
It's a fascinating tale, you have to agree, and it hardly seems complete at this point. Party Gaming is now involved in a bitter battle with former partner Empire Online, and the stock price swings with more abandon than Ron Jeremy's junk. If you think that the main player behind Party Gaming has led a fairly sordid existence then you really need to meet the gentle souls behind Empire Poker. A group who will never be mistaken for scholars or gentlemen, but boy they sure do know how to market online gaming websites, and that's the bottom line these days.
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