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.

All of the cool kids are using Google Calendar these days, and frankly if you’re not then you’re different and strange and people will not be attracted to you.

One of the many good things about Google Calendar is the ability to share calendars with friends or with other users. In fact, Google have used the iCal format popularised by recent MacOSs, so you don’t even have to be using Google Calendar in order to view a calendar created in Google Calendar.

So anyway, a bit of easter weekend boredom prompted me to create a calendar that contains all of the events at the 2006 World Series of Poker which I’d like to share with all of you, so that you too will now be able to locate the lone Stud event in amongst the dozens of NL Hold’em tournaments.

If you’re already using Google Calendar, then the easiest way to add my WSOP calendar is to do a search for ‘poker’ and you should find it on the first page of results.

Otherwise you can click on either of the two links below to get an RSS feed or iCal calendar instead, although I’ve tried the RSS feed in Bloglines and it looks, well… rubbish.

Frankly, given the eight hour time difference between my house and Vegas, I’m not sure how much notice I’ll be taking of the live updates, unless of course the final table takes like three days to finish like it did last year, prompting runner-up Steve Dannenman to admit later that he was happy to give up the $7.5m first prize because he was bored of playing.

At some point I’ll probably do some other calendars for major tournaments in Europe and the US.

If anyone has any trouble with this particular calendar (either finding it or using it) then leave a comment or mail me and I’ll see what I can do.

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]