

HTML5 Anonymous Bitcoin Poker - LeoHaggins
https://www.bearcoinpoker.com

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stevecalifornia
The only gambling occurring is the gambling that this is a trust-worthy
implementation of multi-player poker.

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andy_ppp
Fair enough, but you stand to make a lot more from being trustworthy than
not... I think this is an excellent idea.

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rspeer
> you stand to make a lot more from being trustworthy than not...

What? How do you justify that conclusion? That seems at odds with most of the
history of gambling.

You make the most money if you _appear_ trustworthy but aren't.

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andy_ppp
No. Casinos are trustworthy, or at least you know the house always wins :-)

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abeiz
I experimented with this a few years ago. Even going as far as creating
[https://bitflop.me](https://bitflop.me). I came to the conclusion that the
future legal battles would just not be worth it.

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marcinbejm
is this project in development?

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tomcam
> I came to the conclusion that the future legal battles would just not be
> worth it.

So, no. Wise decision, at least if you're Stateside. Government wants to
preserve its monopoly on gambling.

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loupereira
What assurances are there that the house isn't cheating?

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merlincorey
The house makes money from rake. This means it's not in the house's interest
to enable any cheating, since cheating makes the house less trustworthy, and
therefore, there is less rake being generated.

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encoderer
Unfortunately the criminal mind discounts the possibility of getting caught.
There have been several big scandals of this sort in online poker. Scams at
Absolute, Full Tilt and others have been uncovered.

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merlincorey
Most poker-room scandals are separate from the house cheating and more to do
with bad accounting/book keeping practices and out right stealing.

The Ultimate Bet / Absolute scandal involved super-user accounts being used to
reveal hole-cards of opponents and that most certainly _was_ cheating.

The end result is that room went down in infamy and most of the people
associated with it at the highest levels are looked down upon in the poker
community.

On the other hand, Poker Stars ended up picking up the tab for Full Tilt,
which is now a fairly trustworthy room thanks to Poker Stars' management.

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dec0dedab0de
Not to mention that fult tilt probably could have gotten away with it
indefinitely if they weren't shut down. They were basically practicing a form
of fractional reserve.

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ryanlol
I deposited 0.6 btc, messed around with the site a little bit (didn't play a
single game) and ended now there's only 0.07 btc on my account.

I'm not sure if losing your customers coins is such a great business model.

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LeoHaggins
Please provide me your username, I'll check and make sure this never happened.

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LearnerGeek
how does it stop collusion at the tables ?

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imglorp
Look left; look right. If you're not colluding with either of those guys, then
they're probably colluding against you. :-/

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Taek
Not reassuring. If there's money to be made, people will try to make it. It's
reasonable to assume a group of friends would take a weekend trying to collude
at poker.

There are a few things you could potentially do to make it not worth their
time. The first is to take money before assigning a table, and then randomly
assigning the person. The second is to have the house take such a large cut
that even with collusion it's not profitable.

You still have to worry about Sybil attacks. It's one thing for me and my 3
friends to play poker together and try to land at the same table. It's another
for me and my 1000 bots at different IP addresses (bots who will, of course,
play computationally perfect games and collude any time they are at the same
table) to try and beat the odds.

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z3t4
I think a site like this can easily make more money then say a drug-store on
darknet, but perfectly legal.

There are some challenges though, like multi account cheating, and bot
players.

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mikeash
I thought online gambling was generally not legal.

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dmcginty
I'm in the United States. To my knowledge online gambling is not strictly
illegal, but it's illegal for online casinos to send or receive money to or
from any banking or crediting organization, therefore preventing users from
transferring money into casino accounts. Bitcoin is still in a weird realm
where it's considered property rather than a currency, which I imagine would
make it similar to gambling with gold. (My knowledge is outdated by a couple
years, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

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merlincorey
This is my understanding, as well.

The anti-gambling/anti-poker laws from "Black Friday" in 2011 actually have to
do with banking and USD.

This is why there are actually several US-facing card rooms operating out of
country semi-legally - they do not do banking in the US, so they are not afoul
of laws in most states. I believe New York is a notable exception along with a
few other states which sites like Bovada will not accept US users from.

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nqzero
i'm mildly terrible at poker, but trying to improve. unfortunately, it's hard
to practice unless money is on the line. i'd like to be able to play online
(with smaller blinds and rake than a brick and mortar casino). i'm not
interested in being able to "cash out" ... it's a purely money losing
proposition because of my lack of skill

any idea if there's a way i could play on any of these sites in this manner ?

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merlincorey
The crypto currency sites I'm aware of such as seals (swcpoker.eu), shibes
(pokershibes.eu), and betcoin (betcoin.ag) all have "microstakes" levels.

On the other hand, all of them have low volume of users, so you may not find a
game immediately on any of them.

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RoboTeddy
Using something like Ethereum, it's actually possible to prove that the house
is fair:
[https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/comment/2944/#Comment_...](https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/comment/2944/#Comment_2944)

It involves a clever trick for keeping hole cards and the deck initially
secret, despite the fact that everything in the blockchain is public.

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merlincorey
It seems like the basic poker-game-algorithm is broken here. I have been able
to play without paying blinds, which is not how poker works, generally.

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LeoHaggins
Ahah, yeah, that's a quick bug we introduced today, you were able to join a
table without paying the first blind :D It's been fixed for a few hours now :)

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nofollow
frequently loses connection and when i reconnect the old dealt cards for a
hand are not redrawn, only the newly dealt cards for that hand are drawn.

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tempestn
That's a feature. Don't want to look like a noob, peeking at your hole cards
more than once...

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LeoHaggins
Thanks for the bug report, fixed now :)

