It's the Future

I know a thing or two about Internet poker.

Five years ago, I was called by the founder of PlanetPoker.com, the first Internet poker room, and was asked to be a consultant. Originally, my duties were to coordinate anti-collusion efforts, which is very important in the Internet poker industry. For people to be comfortable playing on the Internet, they must believe that real and genuine efforts have been made to keep the games honest.

Eventually, my role with Planet grew. I became a part of the site's marketing efforts, and became the site's public face as its cardroom manager. I helped implement the Internet poker bulletin board Unitedpokerforum.com, enlisted top-quality pros to answer poker questions there, and formulated standards for moderation. I also post there myself and host the site. I met with software engineers who were designing new and more advanced Internet poker interfaces. I have lectured on Internet poker, and have met with Internet poker players visiting Las Vegas. I've also consulted with others in the industry regarding our responses to government regulation.

It has been an interesting ride. At the onset, many experienced poker executives thought the cyberspace version of our game would never catch on. How wrong they were, in what may well have been wishful thinking! At peak times, more than 100,000 players are playing poker from the convenience of their homes – betting, bluffing, check-raising, and cussing out their opponents. It's poker, as it will predominantly exist in the future. Just as the period from the 1970s to the 1990s marked the evolution of poker from private games to public cardrooms, the present era marks a new evolutionary step. However, just as public cardrooms did not lead to the end of private poker, neither will Internet poker lead to the end of public cardroom poker. The game is not diminished by this evolution, but enhanced. The new world of poker includes private games, public games, and Internet games. That reality is here to stay.

Internet poker is not the same as the real thing, and has its own unique features. It's faster moving, offers more action and more selection, and provides players the ability to play multiple games at once. Nobody can smoke around you if you don't want them to, you choose your own distractions, you can turn off the chat feature, and you don't even need to get dressed and leave the house. While governmental regulation and its effect on transferring funds into and out of games may cloud the horizon, the Internet game is here to stay, and will be the foundation of poker's future.

Internet poker has introduced our game to millions of players who did not have daily poker games available to them. Now, across America and around the world, players can find games and tournaments at a variety of stakes around-the-clock. The number of people who play poker every day is growing at an increasing rate. While this phenomenal rate of growth cannot continue and there are many challenges to the Internet poker industry, it is here to stay. I plan in my next several columns to give you something of an insider's look into how Internet poker has evolved, the parameters of what can and can't be done, the issues confronting the industry, and what the future may hold.

As the Internet poker industry has developed, I have developed a perspective that's available to few others. I have spent the past five years in the place where poker knowledge, business issues, matters of integrity, government regulation, marketing, and software development intersect. As is the case with all new industries and ventures, in which many things are being defined for the first time, the learning curve has been steep. Like the intrepid explorers of Star Trek, Internet poker pioneers have boldly gone where no one has gone before, and I have immensely enjoyed my role as a partner in that journey.

Once upon a time not too long ago and not too far away, there was one Internet poker program offered by a company named ASF, which was licensed to or leased by anyone wanting to offer real-money poker over the net. The software company took a percentage of the gross drop. There was limited interaction between the software developers and the businessmen who took the risks to build the industry. What distinguished one site from another were such matters as policy, marketing, how collusion and other integrity issues were handled, and the ease of moving funds in and out of the site. Sites have come and gone. Recent industry data indicates that there are now approximately 120 poker sites.

New software developers have come along. People who owned poker sites have poured their profits into building a better Internet game, creating new interfaces, backends, and different system operations. Today, we are into the second generation of Internet poker software, and the third generation is not far off. As many choices as there are available to players today, the future will offer even more.

Writing an Internet poker program is not easy. One Internet programming project manger once told me, "It was over 10 times harder than I initially thought it would be to launch a poker program." Then, he added, "At launch, the nightmare of my life started." The combination of possible events in a poker game is almost infinite, and when writing an Internet poker program, you need to have all of them logically defined and a program routine to account for all of them; otherwise, the program will freeze up. Also, when you realize that in order to have an Internet poker game, you need to be able to send signals to 10 players who are all over the planet, receive a signal back from them, keep everyone connected (even those in third-world countries with poor communication systems), decipher the information, and display it on a screen, it is a wonder that the games function at all.

Internet poker is developing technologically. From the foundations of the ASF software developed more than six years ago, advances have taken place. I have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours teaching poker concepts to programmers and staff members who are trying to learn programming concepts and how they affect poker.

Protecting against collusion was just one of the many areas I discussed with programmers. We had to define parameters that would flag potential collusion. Writing a program to identify anomalous poker plays was much harder. Delineating certain raising and folding patterns that indicated a possibility of collusion was harder yet.

One of the hardest things to implement has been determining when the program should bring the combination of variables that might indicate collusion to the attention of a human. At PlanetPoker, every single allegation of potential collusion made by a player finds its way to my desk, as does every potential collusion program flagged by the software. I know that many other sites have a person in a similar role. I investigate every allegation, reviewing hundreds and sometimes thousands of hands that relate to every single potential collusion situation. And then to top it off, there is a system of random review. These anti-collusion efforts are but a single example of where the poker player and the programmer must work together.

As I'll discuss at greater length in a later column, an important concept in the Internet poker business is keeping games "live" and encouraging future action by having rules and policies that are designed to some extent to assist weaker players, such as offering a note-taking feature. Keeping "live" players in the game longer serves the interest of the game on many levels.

Not long ago, an Internet poker site introduced a feature that allowed players to take notes on their opponents and have those notes stored. Being able to write notes about your opponents on your client base (the software has two bases, one downloaded on your computer and one on a server in another location) changed the nature of the game as played on the Internet, and differentiated it significantly from live poker in brick-and-mortar establishments.

The note-taking feature made player recall strengths much less important and replaced them with good organizational and note-taking skills. It also made playing multiple games less mentally taxing, allowing players to play longer hours more effectively. Additionally, it strengthened the position of the serious player who was willing to make the effort to take notes, and weakened the position of the recreational player who found that making that level of effort took much of the fun out of the game.

Because the note-taking feature significantly increased the edge of serious players at the expense of recreational players, I encouraged my company's management to resist the trend to add the feature. As time went on, more and more sites added the feature, until it became clear that we would eventually have to add it for competitive reasons. Although it might hurt the game in the long run, by shifting money from softer players to tougher players faster, the competitive marketplace dictated the adoption of the feature.

These are just a few examples of what is going on in Internet poker today, how business decisions affect variables in ways that most people don't consider, and the absolute certainty that whatever direction Internet poker takes, it will have twists and turns that will surprise each and every one of us.

In my next couple of columns, I'll provide more examples of how Internet poker differs from public cardroom poker, how the industry addresses different issues, and what is going on in this fast-changing business today.

Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for more than 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas. If you would like to ask Roy poker-related questions, you may do so online at www.UnitedPokerForum.com. His longtime collaborator John Bond is a free-lance writer in South Florida.