Some of the claims in this thread make little sense to be honest and others exemplify the conflict between wishful, very sincere hype and actual proposed use cases.

Decentralized poker is a very tough row to hoe in reality. The reality is that poker players favor liquidity and other attributes of a good user experience above all else. That a game is decentralized, i.e. runs on a blockchain rather than a central game server, is secondary to the user experience factor. To the extent that the decentralized game can offer other competitive benefits, such as low cost and quick transactions, "neutral" retention of control of funds in play, "fair shuffling", et cetera, those attributes may weigh in its favor.

Decentralized gambling in other channels, such as lotto, casino or sports betting, face fewer challenges; in my view these easier channels can drag poker along by attracting and educating prospective poker players to the decentralized experience.

(By way of disclosure, I have been working folks at Virtue Poker and approaching traditional igaming regulators to make available game certification and licensing.)

It's important to disambiguate at least two different meanings of "decentralization". First thereis the meaning that refers to a change from a time when, for example, poker stars had 70% of the market (I read in an amaya report), to a change of times when there is a lot of competition and not just one main operator.

A different meaning for decentralization would be an evolution in which a site can be created and maintained in a modular fashion. You choose the parameters that you want. Toggle if you want to comply or not, and the software adjusts. Choose your payment options. Choose your skin's/UI. Everything is created by different groups with separate interests and each are meant to interface with each other..

It is not a complex change nor is the process complex. It's a natural evolution, something we will see soon. There is no team to be paid to do it, just a few groups are needed to catch up on the paradigm.


The liquidity is about who creates the best parameters (ie poker offerings), has the best marketing, the best bonuses, best security etc.

The problem of liquidity is really a problem of the friction caused by legacy payment processors and restrictions. Going forward liquidity is decided by the most honest site that best serves the customer. I think if we haven't understood the new metric created by these tokens then we aren't addressing this reality they will create.

There is no "decentralized experience", from the user's perspective the only thing that changes is better service and lower effective rake.

Well, apparently we are talking about different things entirely:

1. Decentralised gaming/poker

I'll stick with my definition of "decentralized" as "residing or running games to whatever extent on a decentralized blockchain."

I have not been talking about whether PokerStars has some monopoly in its markets, although certainly not in the US.

I have not addressed the secondary topic of what form a decentralized gaming experience might take.

2. "Liquidity" describes the number of players available at any given time to participate in games. This is pretty objective condition, at least to players, they get the game choice they desire or not ...

Your foray into speculation as to the drivers of greater or lesser liquidity are different than my experience in the industry,although payment processing friction was a prime driver pre crypto....

Aside from payment friction, there are MANY, MANY other factors that influence the user experience once a deposit payment has been successful ....

The observation on payment friction is that the boycotts COULD have possibly been successful of there was no such friction. It's a more slippery game/slope for sites like poker stars now because if they lose a customer to crypto poker they likely lost them forever. And on the most part it pays to change over.

The (reduced) cost which involves a dollar cost but also a time cost, to moving from site to site traditionally, compared to today, has a significant effect on the value of the network. Something like this I think:





Agreed. The conjecture is that on a free market of exchange, which is where tokenization is heading (its at least observable a lot more free if not total), the price trend of the token will reflect the aggregate of all of the factors that players of all types look for. So in the future, noobs to poker, will quickly learn to check the price trend of the casino token, in order to ascertain the quality of the product.

Edit: the problem with friction is the market doesn't arbitrage itself very well. This has the function of players not properly evaluating the effective rake or service on each site. And its a complex compounding problem. So we now should expect it to go from wildly out of control to a very observable and useful signal.

You simply miss the point about poker, your waxing a Szabo carrot about crypto does nothing to address poker-specific issues, terms and challenges.

Sorry, I've got 18 years in on online poker and 5+ years in on crypto and gaming. "decentralization" and "liquidity" have useful meaning in crypto-poker discussions. If you want to pretend"decentralization means whatever you want it to mean, your contribution to a meaningful discussion about decentralized poker is quickly exhausted

Use of crypto for deposits/withdrawals is already commonplace and already addresses the sort of "friction" you obsess over. Your seizing upon a really trivial development ifyou want to discuss a decentralized poker offering. Using crypto for for deposits and cashouts is far from "decentralization" of poker, or any other gaming channel. (FWIW, the introduction o Neteller, across poker networks pretty much negated the "friction effect" you now see as a benefit of crypto.")

The citation of Szabo is of an explanation that is applicable to bitcoin, that bitcoin reduces the cost and time to transfer large amounts of wealth and the cost savings is inversely proportional to the 4th order. If we render the observation for poker it means the friction holds back a great amount of value and causes the players to have a stickiness in regard to migrating to or from different sites.

Yes this has change but it has not taken full effect. Over the next year we will see the greatest change in this regard.

If poker is being run on a single blockchain in a world of many blockchains I think that is not very decentralized. Same if it is created by one team and/or one project. My definition is far more broad and more significant from the players view. Too many people have got hung up on the belief that decentralization is synonymous with p2p or blockchain. You could make a centralized project that runs p2p and/or with a blockchain.

I believe that players want a good user experience, which I believe depends upon levels of liquidity, speed of game, perceived fairness, ease of use, ease of deposit/cashout, rake, fees, et cetera.

You seemingly assume poker players care more or even one whit about decentralization as such, i.e your derivative views about how many blockchains are used, etc.

Poker players want to play poker, if a "decentralized" user experience can deliver a good experience, and enough players decide to migrate to it or try it ab initio, there maybe a genuine opportunity for decentralized poker in the future.

These are the things that would be reflected in the price of the token.

Here i think you are using decentralized in the context of serverless aka p2p. The decentralized experience for the user is not different than today other than a better product because of the competition the free market fosters.

It doesn't matter who uses what definition but its important to clarify. There is a "genuine opportunity" perhaps for different teams like virtue poker, but in regard to the decentralization of poker or decentralized poker, there cannot be just one group or project that releases it. That's a centralized approach to decentralization. Any MANY projects and leaders have missed this critical point. In this context its not a genuine opportunity as much as a natural order.

Decentralised poker has no future. People want their online poker experience to be similar to real casino.

There isn't a definition of decentralised in which the user experience is not better in this or pretty much any aspect. You should read some of this thread, it might be interesting/enlightening.

Not as many feel that way as you might think and that model ran into multi-tabling as a market requirement around 2002.

In 2001 my then-company launched a poker business based upon that niche, "make it similar to live poker". We launched a 3D client in 2001, live chat on the table, you had to pick up your cards to look at them, which other folks could see, cashouts were processed ASAP to reflect going to the cage to cashout live, etc.

BUT,

1. You cannot multi-table in a live game. Since liquidity IS king, and multi-tabling drove liquidity, game design was forced to cater to multi-table functionality.

2. Online is different than live poker in other respects as well and exhibits similarity only in the underlying rules of the games offered. The multi-table aspect however was the key differentiation. (Probably the next differentiation was the ability to offer huge fields in tournaments with little marginal cost for scaling. Same for offering micro-stakes.)

3. By 2004, my then-brand had to change from its focus on "similarity to live" to survive climbing the burning rope of liquidity. The 3D "real poker" look was copied, but also abandoned by other operators, such as Playtech and PKR, for similar reasons. According to a talk I had with Playtech at the time they switched off the strategy , only about 5% of their players cared about "similar to live poker".

I think another interesting discussion besides a better offer for the existing market, is the goal to reach out for newer customers. Its only so long as how much liquidity sites can share, but what are the possibilities of attracting players from other segments?

It would be a dream of any to rise poker popularity to a level where it can compete in demand to other entertainment business giants. What could we do to help rise poker into competitive levels with, for example, gaming titans like guns or soccer video games? Imo to transit on this path it is a must that the poker gaming experience becomes not just provably fair, reasonably secure or considerable profitable; but also truly fun.

Damn even Zynga poker has funny items to unlock at the avatar side... it is insulting that the strongest yet weakest attempt at this are Amayastars chests.

If this is too off topic I would like to be pointed out to a thread where it could belong as I have found none

Interesting topic, much needed derail from this thread of two guys arguing over decentralization. How to make poker fun? My two cents, online poker has always suffered from being a single player game in a multiplayer world. Online poker needs clans or teams so friends can "party up" and play together on the same table. Yes its collusion, no I don't give af as long as the game mode permits it.

Wearable computers certainly. As I type this my phone is next to my hip in a belt-loop carrier, so we're pretty close to wearables already. Google Glass is also making a comeback--you can buy them from Walmart.

https://www.walmart.com/search/searc...399290&veh=sem

Do we want new players to be "properly evaluating the effective rake or service on each site?" Two of my sons play poker and they don't want to do all that. They just want to buy into a game with the misconception that they are good players and have fun for a little less than an hour (that's as long as they can last in an MTT, then they lose some money in a cash game.) I'm a full-time player who wants to make money playing against opponents who are clueless, not players who are analytical.

When I choose a tournament, live or online, I analyze everything: how many seats at the table, the buy-in, how many minutes for a blind level, how good is my competition, etc. I don't want us training a bunch of players to think like that, and a lot of players, like my sons, don't want to think like that.

If you started explaining effective rake to my youngest son, he would say something like "I just want to play poker." He doesn't want to read or study something. He's a hands-on guy, a very good mechanic and welder, great at doing the work but struggled in his classes (army and college.) He played poker with his army buddies, he thinks that makes him a good player, and he doesn't want to know about anything else.

That's just the kind of player I want sitting across from me. I hope we're not going to train a bunch of players to be nerds, or only attract nerds. If I want to go to a MENSA meeting I'll try to figure out how to make a WPT final table.

Why would you want your sons to make less than optimal decisions? Nobody needs to explain effective rake anymore, it will be understood as a price/value trend. And yes we want this, it would take time to unpack but ultimately its a great change for our civilization.

Crossposting this because its quite relevant and might spark different lines of dialogue:

Most poker players don't make optimal decisions, they don't know anything about GTO, they don't know what a price/value trend is and they don't know what effective rake means. My sons are poker legends in their own minds. For them it's recreation, just like playing Call of Duty.

It's basic 2+2 doctrine--don't tap the fish tank. We want to make money. We do not want to educate the bad players. Poker is my job and I'm in it for the money.
It's all about the benjamins.


"To play this game you have to be willing to bust your grandmother." --- Doyle Brunson

.... perhaps, perhaps not.

.... but if everyone also plays GTO, is poker reduced to a 100% game of chance among those players ? ..... and everyone playing eventually goes broke paying rake, even if it is reduced ?

That is your "great change for our civilization" ?

edit: you are on point btw...but your sentiments are my premise...

It is propriety, and natural order, that the games tend towards GTO. We evolved an unsolvable game, a game that is so deep we cannot conquer it without machines. But eventually we will "beat" poker" and when we do we'll make great strides as a civilization. Games, comparable problems, and their solutions have always advanced like this, in relation to each other and our culture.

There is no stopping it, recreationals in the future will be better than pros today, and poker is finite in the way that there is a ceiling for optimal play.

But what I have shown, proposed, or explained is that the metric that the token valuation (price) creates allows for (effective) rake targeting (ie profitability). You could approach it many ways, rakeback perhaps, but even putting less than average bots in the games if everyone else was already "too good".

To be able to measure effective rake, that is the advance-a new metic. The technology that comes out of it is "secure multiparty computations". The p2p ability to fairly and securely create a set of objects, shuffle them, pull some out or return some, and do computations without revealing the underlying data.

That is the great change and it is for our largest institutions.

In regard to games, the ability for anyone to spin up their own "poker site" just by choosing different parameters, with each aspect of the software modulated to interface with each other aspect, will allow not just for a free market for poker site competition, but a free market for the evolution of (card) games.

Poker used to have 23 or so cards. Limit hold em was popular but far more solvable than no-limit, and now players are enjoying omaha with 4 cards. With decentralized poker we can change every aspect on a whim. There is no central controller of the cards or the rules. The markets are the best force for dealing with complexity and an amount of a date no person or subset group could properly handle. The brute force discovery, through free market competition, of optimal games.

Nooseknot's posting soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4

What do you think, is trusting blockchain casinos is good idea at all? I`ve found this article https://europeangaming.eu/portal/pre...-as-las-vegas/ but I can`t imagine how it works. Has anybody heard about LEAP protocol?

I'd advise waiting and seeing and beware of ICOs which have " a really good concept, we swear ..." The Gertrude Stein Rule should apply to concept ICOs, unless shown otherwise, there is probably no "there", there.

Not clear what the LEAP protocol has to do with anything here other than it is metntioned. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightw...ation_Protocol

There are MANY decentralized gaming projects underway, some of which seem way further along than the one in this article.

Buy and HODL ETH if you think someone will come to market with a successful gaming application based on the Etherium blockchain.

Thank you! I agree with you as I noticed many of ICO`s are a failure from the very beggining and casinos are rather the proof of that than an exeption, unfortunatelly. But some projects look attractive.

What are the most prospective in your mind?

Decentralized everything is the future. But not the present.