Just read the website, it says the bots can adjust to you.

Sigh.

Its sad that something closer to a slot machine is considered "legal", yet we are still playing real skill based poker on shady offshore sites.

I really hope this doesn't catch on.

yay capitalism

That's a good point, somewhat negated by the the matches being more than just one hand (presumably someone who repeatedly called off getting the wrong odds would suffer for it), but the goal isn't to eliminate chance - even in a 72 hole golf tournament chance plays a role - the legal target in those 28 states is for skill to predominate over chance.

Good posts and exactly what I would have said.I do agree with this practical take on how to reconcile logic/math and the legal standard of "skill vs. chance"... but then, you'd really think that a company would try offering, you know, actual poker with a locked-in commitment to play a certain number of hands before prizes are awarded instead of these silly perturbations & perversions to the game.


Part of me admires the creative and innovative approaches that companies like this take, and I certainly admire any means of finding a way to offer poker to people who want to play it, but the intellectual dishonesty of the claims that changes such as these "make poker into a game of skill" are disgusting to me. I get that removing salient random elements (the randomness of the cards) would, intuitively, lessen the luck in a game, and would tend to be convincing to the average person, but if it can't be done without introducing new uncertainties into the game...

This one is a better variant than duplicate poker because at least it doesn't change the underlying strategy. You're still maximizing $EV=ChipEV at every decision, which is nice, but also pretty plainly shows that the amount of skill in the game is the same as that of standard poker... standard poker played against a bot, at least, which is certainly a practically-undesirable necessity of the structure of this variant. At any rate, the video on the main page which claims that their variant "adds more skill" is plainly wrong.

Presumably they mean to say that their variant "removes luck", which is not the same as adding skill, and also possibly not particularly true in practice. Having another player's decisions dictate your outcomes in hands where you've chosen to fold can add a lot of luck. Under any reasonable measure of luck, I would not be surprised to find that this game has more luck than standard poker, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that it had less. It certainly does not follow immediately from the removal of a random element. Even on a per-unit-time basis or with any fixed length of gameplay, this game could go either way in terms of being more or less luck, I think.

In theory, if both players played the (unknown) perfect Nash equilibrium strategy for the game, and if the bots did not used mixed strategies (seems like they do, though), no money would ever change hands. So, interestingly, this variant has less luck or variance in the results than standard poker when played by perfect players. I'm pretty sure this shouldn't mean anything, though.

Also potentially interesting: most (all?) other "skill game" or "sweepstakes" model US poker sites have blocked only 10-12 states. I'm not sure what these folks are doing differently to block so many more states, perhaps they're just taking more conservative readings of state laws.

i actually think this is pretty awesome

I'm pretty sure Zwillinger is one of the guys who also told Stars and FTP that what they were doing was legal.

wow, CA is one of the states that cannot play. Tilting

Looking through the list, in addition to the States that don't use the dominant factor test, they also prohibit customers from the States that have specific internet gaming prohibitions.

They also excluded California, which is odd since the California Supreme Court developed the dominant factor test most other courts use as precedent, and California doesn't have an internet gaming ban - the worldwinner skill gaming site is even based in California.

Did I go back in time to 2007? Pretty are there have been one or two other sites trying something similarly dumb.

I'm doing PR for SkillBet (we'll have a forum on twoplustwo in a week or two ... we haven't officially launched yet). The reason we don't offer SkillBet in California is because it requires a license to offer any game played with cards, and as you might imagine getting a license in CA is no easy feat.

Is there a way to make poker a "fantasy sport" defined by UIGEA

As others have noted, there's still just as much luck/skill element in this form of poker as there is "regular" poker.

I'd love to hear why they think their form of poker is legal with an argument that can't also be applied to a traditional online poker site.

"Our legal team says it's legal" didn't fly for Pokerstars, Full Tilt, and UB, and it won't fly here either. If they're lucky, they'll just stay small enough to stay off the DoJ radar.