The Birth Of Mobile Poker - Part III

BM: Am I correct in saying you’re the only mobile poker operator with a multi-table function? How difficult was that to develop and why do you think others have had trouble following you with this innovation?

CMcC: As far as I am aware we are the only mobile operator which allows multiple tables visible on screen at one time. Other mobile clients allow multi-tabling but only display one table at a time, so the player is left to tab between the tables to see what’s going on. This gets tiresome quickly and makes it very difficult to multi-table for an extended period of time.

The Android app was built from the ground up with this feature in mind and there were no major ‘gotchas’ in developing it. We wanted to ensure that it was easy to see the action at any time on all tables that you were playing at and that you could swap quickly to any table when you needed to. We’ve achieved this in both the iPad and Android version. We are now working on bringing the same feature to out iPhone users.

Why are others slow to follow? Many other poker sites have gone the route of Zoom or Rush poker instead of allowing true multi-tabling.

BM: What will 2013 and beyond hold for Switch Poker?

CMcC: Customers come first at Switch Poker and always will. Our software has been developed with the aim of transforming the mobile poker experience in something more immersive and entertaining than typical online poker. There is something magical in touching the cards with your fingers rather than clicking a mouse and we want our players to sense this. Players have been our muses for every improvement of the software and every bonus we created and we plan our future developments with this in mind.

We have many software improvements planned, including bringing the multi-tabling feature to the iPhone, taking advantage of new sound capabilities of the iOS 6 and eventually new poker games.

We currently give our players the opportunity to earn money by telling their friends about Switch Poker using our Aeroplane referral system as well as giving all players cash bonuses at random intervals directly into their account. New promotions are in the works which reward our players in every step of the game. So watch out for our next updates!

BM: What do you see as the next great leaps forward for mobile poker? Will it always be considered the ‘little brother’ to traditional PC/Mac-based online poker or could it become the predominant platform in the future?

CMcC: All consumer applications will be mobile in the not-too-distant future. If you are using a computer now chances are that it’s a laptop. Ten years ago that would not have been the case. Ten years from not you will most likely be using something that doesn’t have a permanent keyboard at all and that you carry around all the time.

I see a future where our phones will be sufficiently powerful to power all of the programs that we currently rely on our laptops for. Instead of owning a smart phone, tablet and laptop we will have only a mobile phone which we dock (wirelessly perhaps) to a monitor when we need a larger display and a keyboard when we need to do lot of data entry.

Even today you can get a 256GB drive so tiny that one could swallow if the bet was large enough. Tomorrow the whole computer will be this size and the only remaining large elements will be those that we need to be large for data input and output. Mobile poker won’t be the little brother of traditional PC-based poker because traditional PCs will no longer exist.

This change will begin, has already begun I should say, with apps capable of running on both small phones and large desktop computers. They will be designed to be used with both a mouse pointer and touch screen. Windows 8 has begun in this direction. Although is it not yet possible to run the same app on both Windows 8 PCs and phones it is, according to Larry Lieberman, senior product manager at Microsoft, something that Microsoft want to figure out how to get to as soon as possible. I would bet that Google and Apple are thinking the same.

We can’t wait to get our hands on some Google Glasses to try our hand at making a poker app for them. Imagine being able to play when out for a walk or a jog, without crashing into lampposts because you were looking down at your phone. It is only a matter of time until this is possible.

BM: Do you see any synergies between live poker and mobile poker?

CMcC: Certainly. The future is bright in this area and I think we will see significant movement once U.S. legislation is sorted out. When this happens the larger U.S. bricks and mortar (B&M) casinos will make their forays into the world of online poker and they will, I imagine, want a smooth transition between their B&M games and their online games.

Picture the following. In five years you may walk into the MGM Grand to play some poker. Instead of buying physical chips you fund your new MGM casino account and sit at any of the bustling digital poker tables in the room.

You can choose a table where you play against only the people at the table in the room, or a table where you play against other MGM players wherever they may be. Incidentally, the digital poker tables allow you to get in some rounds of blackjack between hands.

After your session you are offered a tablet that you can bring to your hotel room or the pool on which you can continue playing against the same players. When you checkout MGM ask for the tablet back, but that’s OK because you can now play whenever you like using the phone app that you have been sent by the casino.

I think the blurring of live and online mobile poker is inevitable and it will bring the best aspects of live play and the best aspects of online play to everyone.

Read part I and part II of The Birth Of Mobile Poker.

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