Zynga, the creators of the morbidly unnecessary free-to-play games FarmVille Mafia Wars and CityVille, hosted its inaugral PokerCon event over the weekend at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Hosted by Annie Duke and Ali Nejad, the former needing no introduction and the latter needing no place near poker, it was a massive sellout success for their Facebook Texas Hold’em Poker app.

Comically advertised as a “$100k freeroll” to the first 500 Zynga faithful to dish out the $125 entry fee, participants also received continental breakfast, a buffet lunch, poker instruction by Duke, meet and greets with celebrities of the felt (Doyle Brunson, Scotty Nguyen, Mike Sexton, David Williams, Gavin Smith, Vanessa Rousso, to name a few), a VIP party at Moon at the Palms, and a live performance by B.o.B.  (I wasn’t excited about the artist until I typed his name into Wikipedia, at which point I still wasn’t excited.) For people grinding up their fake bankrolls on Facebook, the two-day event must have felt like a poor man’s World Series of Poker, especially to Aaron Alawen, the winner of the $26,000 first place prize.

Zynga was recently estimated to be worth between $7 and $9 billion, according to a report released today in The Wall Street Journal. While their games are “free” to play, the microtransactions of goods and services within them cost you money, which if the company’s worth is any indication, millions of people have too much time and money on their hands. They’ve created a way where a mainstream following can feel like they aren’t nerds for playing a game because it’s a casual experience, or in this instance, can cater to people too afraid and too stupid to deposit actual money online.

I still have a real hard time justifying why people play poker for play money, on a social networking site of all things. Once you break that real money seal, there’s no closing gambling jar; it’s a desire that needs to be refrigerated. Can you believe that there are actually users–over 38 million of them–who pay real money for tens of thousands of fake chips on Facebook? Laughable, sad, and true, an entire world awaits these people that’s just a few clicks and credit card numbers away. Instead, they choose to spend their insubstantial time playing to be the kings of nothing on Facebook, a safe haven for people already committed to squandering their lives away.