White Belt Poker

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a thirty minute programme last night about the $50,000 Man versus Machine Poker Championships that took place in Vancouver last July when Ali Eslami and Phil Laak took on the latest poker bot software created by researchers at the University of Alberta.

You can listen to the programme on the BBC website (probably for a limited time).

It’s an intelligent look at Laak and Eslami’s narrow win and the implications for the game, particularly online. There are interviews with the protagonists as well as other players like Terence Chan, who talk about how the increasing sophistication of poker software is likely to impact on their potential future earnings.

According to this report on a survey done by the American Gaming Association, “just 19 per cent of US internet gamblers realise – or are willing to admit – that the activity is currently illegal”.

Interestingly, “more than half (55 per cent) believe online gaming companies find ways to cheat, and 46 per cent believe their fellow players cheat.”

It’s a fascinating report with enough pie charts and statistics to make your head spin.

My run of good results in WWdN Eurofriendly tournaments at PokerStars continued on Friday. After driving like a maniac to get home in time for the start (and getting back a few minutes late), I was there until the bitter end again, this time finishing in second place after I won the first one back in February.

Obviously you have to be delighted with such a good result, but I was still a little bit disappointed not to win it again. There were a couple of occasions when I had big chip leads at the final table – double the number of chips that anyone else had when we were down to seven, and more significantly, having 30k of the 55k in play when we were down to three. But perhaps that’s being super picky. I thought I played really well, but just got out-played heads-up by fellow British poker blogger TanOrpheus.

I’m really taking a liking to tournaments with longer blind intervals, so I should probably make more of an effort to look for non-WWdN tournaments with similar blind structures to play in.

As I said, I got home a few minutes late so I missed the first couple of hands at my table. That was long enough for Pauly to bust out though, although I didn’t see quite how he managed it. I don’t suppose he’s going to mention it now that he’s out in Vegas at the WPT Championship either, so if anybody was on that table and saw what happened, let me know. All I saw was the aftermath – somebody saying, “wow, that was a brave call” in the chat window.

Incidently, if I ever come across ‘Jemad19′ at the tables again, dude, I’ll be giving you more than the $1 you asked me and Tan to lend you while we were trying to concentrate on playing heads-up. How anybody has the nerve to just walk in like that at the end of a tournament and ask to borrow money is just beyond me.

As ever though, it was a fun tournament to play in. Thanks again to Wil for setting it up. Somehow, I managed to avoid playing at the same table as him again though. Never mind, one of these days.

There were more problems for PokerRoom this weekend when a hacker managed to take control of the chat system without anyone from the company’s staff stopping him for about four hours. The response from their security team was posted on the company’s forum here. The replies by the players are pretty scathing. I don’t play there very much any more and I’ve kept a minimal balance for a while now, but there is a lot of concern that if somebody could hack into the chat system, then how much harder would it be to get into the account servers?? That doesn’t sound likely, and most players were just complaining about the amount of time it took to kick the “chat hacker” out.

But on that same thread, there is one report of the hacker exploiting a problem with the login system which was made public almost a month ago, which allowed anyone to have their username and password stolen just from clicking on a link to a website. If this is true then PokerRoom and the Ongame network really need to get their act together. They’ve already got the beginnings of a mass cash-out on their hands if their forums are anything to go by, so they’ll need to take some pretty swift and decisive action and make it look as if they care about security if they’re going to retain player confidence.

As ever, it’s difficult even for people who work in the IT industry to know exactly how genuine these exploits are, but to inexperienced users just dipping their toes in the online poker water, this could be terrifying. Even rational, knowledgable people will start to think about cashing out when a company not only allows something like this to happen, but also gives the impression (fairly or not) that they are indifferent to the consequences.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard about a new British-based online poker room that’s due to open up in the next few months that is making bold claims about revolutionising online poker software. It’s called PKR.com and after a quick glance at the screenshots and the video trailer it’s obvious why the company are talking about a revolution. The in-game footage is very reminiscent of a couple of recent console games – WPT and Stacked. The 3d software looks jaw-droppingly good – perhaps even better than the aforementioned video games, so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to beta-test it soon. Last time I checked, their beta test signup is still open to anyone who wants to take part.

The obvious concern is that 3d poker software has been tried before, with limited success. I know Noble Poker tried it and eventually withdrew it, possibly because it was buggy, although it looked great. I should think that a broadband connection has to be a pre-requisite for the 3d views and even then, will the old problems of ‘lag’ with 3d online gaming become apparent too? It’ll be interesting to see. Given the people in charge, I’m sure they’re aware of this, but more on that later. It is apparently possible to choose camera angles around the table, so it’s perfectly possible to play just from an overhead view just like everywhere else.

Of course, just having great software isn’t going to be enough to make Pkr.com a success. They’ll need to attract large numbers of players, preferably bad players. After all, a poker site is only as good as the bad players it attracts. Reel in the fish and the sharks will follow as well. There was some scepticism on a recent 2+2 Forum thread, but I think this could be a real fish magnet. The cool software will draw in bad players and inexperienced players and it’ll bring in video gamers who may not have played online before. That leads me nicely on to mentioning some of the people behind Pkr.com, who have certainly come from the games industry.

There are some very interesting people involved in PKR, which makes me think they’ve got a good chance of succeeding with what they’re trying to do. First of all, there’s CEO Jez San, who has a long history in the video games industry, having written his first games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga while in his teens, before founding his own company Argonaut Games, and subsequently being involved with several software companies that have produced console and mobile games. (Thirty-something video game geeks like me may be interested to know that San was involved in developing the Super FX chip which allowed the then-revolutionary 3d scrolling shooter Star Fox to be released on the SuperNES). San eventually becoming the first person ever to be awarded an OBE for services to the computer game industry in 2002.

The company’s COO is Leon Walters, who I believe was the Executive Producer of SWAT: Global Strike Team which was a first-person shooter (in the Rainbow Six mould) released for Xbox and PS2 in 2003, which featured a very striking 3d game engine. Have you spotted the 3d game theme here yet?

Also involved as VP Marketing is Simon Prodger, former Product Marketing Manager of Victor Chandler Poker who as well as having the obvious experience with one the biggest British poker sites has also written a few articles about online poker himself, including here and here.

Overall, this is definitely a site I’ll be keeping an eye on. It’ll be very interesting to see how good the software is and how the company plan to position themselves in what is a very crowded marketplace.

UPDATE: There are rumours that Phil Laak and Jennifer Tilly have signed up to represent PKR.com, although the PKR.com site hasn’t confirmed it yet.
[tags]online poker, pkr.com, poker software[/tags]