Author Topic: PokerChips: Hosting Fair RNG Sessions  (Read 18843 times)

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Offline Empirical1

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My concern with this DAC that doesn't seem to be being addressed yet is that  - An online poker site is a lot like a night club.

You can charge guys less for entry but if there's no hot chicks inside they'd rather go somewhere else and pay more.
(In this case the guys are the serious/semi-pro/professional poker players and the hot chicks are the recreational players.)

$ made from weaker players - rake + rakeback = Player Profit

Lots of Pokerstars budget for example goes to sponsorships, glitzy promotions, customer service, security and creating a good user experience. This expenditure is designed to attract the recreational (weaker) player (Who don't even understand how much rake they're paying.) The rest of the player pool (which actually put in most of the volume and generate most of the sites profit) is generally going to where the most recreational players are.

I think that's something to keep in mind - that being successful here is also about being able to offer more than just reduced rake.
 
There is a market here in the crypto-economy I guess, as Seals With Clubs managed to attract a decent user base.
I think in the US there is also tax on poker winnings and a poker DAC might make that a bit more avoidable. 
« Last Edit: April 07, 2014, 03:38:44 pm by Empirical1 »

Offline Empirical1

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Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

The thing about blockchains is that every time you play you can be a new user.

How about making your seat and table random?  The player can't choose where they play.

Pokerstars has 'Zoom' tables at multiple stakes.
There are usually a couple of hundred people in the zoom pool at any one time.
After each hand you are zoomed to another random table & given a new hand, this is to speed up the action but it also means you can't collude because the likelihood of you sitting at the same table as your colluders enough is very low.

Also I'm sure 80% of the poker volume is under 2/4 ($400 buy-in tables) and at those levels colluding is pretty pointless. Winners at those stakes are either bum-hunting (seeking out & getting position on weak/recreational players, no collusion needed, not worth it.) or they're mass multi-tabling playing 8-24 tables at the same time, making so many decisions so quickly it's not possible to collude. (They break even and live off rake-back*)

Rake* you showed the rake table earlier in the thread which looks lucrative for shareholders but bear in mind players can get anywhere from 20-60% of that back on most sites via rake-back. So you'd probably have to undercut that model by 75% to be attractive.

A bigger problem at lower stakes than colluding is bots, many people have automated bots that just play basic strategy on multiple tables and eek out a profit.


Offline Overthetop

« Last Edit: April 06, 2014, 05:50:21 am by Overthetop »
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Offline Stan

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GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

The fact that news like this does not move the PTS price at all tells me that the investors in this space have no clue what they are doing.

Er, I mean, this is incredibly great news.

BitShares is a tinderbox in a powder keg filled with rocket fuel looking for a spark.


And you all know what happens when this baby gets up to 88 miles per hour...
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Offline thisisausername

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
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The fact that news like this does not move the PTS price at all tells me that the investors in this space have no clue what they are doing.

Er, I mean, this is incredibly great news.
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Offline gamey

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I played poker on the first for money poker site and have been vaguely involved ever since.  Big fan of bitshares/protoshares.

Collusion between players is a concern, but the real concern as a player is that another player colludes with the house.  Having 2 players collude is a huge disadvantage, but it is nothing compared to having another player know YOUR hole cards.  Everyone here addresses collusion, but the real problem is guaranteeing that no one has a client that gives them unfair information.  I don't see anyone addressing this ?  How can I inspect the DAC?  How would that work ?  Creating a RNG seems like the first issue and was what people talked about in the early days of poker, but guess what...  To this day there has not been one known incident of a rigged RNG.  There have been multiple known issues of "super-users" and quite a few suspected ones.

Any variant of actual poker relies on bluffing and betting or it is not poker.  These features of poker mean that once an opponent has knowledge of your hand, you have 0 chance of winning.  I don't think you can have any sort of provably fair poker because of this.  The closest thing you'll get is a game like open face chinese poker.  It isn't really a poker game but relies on poker hands for scoring.  Everyone draws 1 card at a time and plays it in their hand face up.  This can be made provably fair, but it is not poker.

Poker is great, but I can't see any real advantage for having it hosted on a blockchain.
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Offline HackFisher

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Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline betax

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Offline unimercio

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GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
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Woohoo!!! Is this an 80 page document on how poker will work as a DAC?

Offline toast

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Offline thisisausername

I suspect the statistics of colluding players (more folds, probably) and that of non-colluding players would look different enough that a statistical model could be trained to recognize likely cases and lower a chain-based trust metric accordingly.  We'd have to tie it to Keyhotee IDs above a certain trust ranking themselves to prevent sybils. (Assuming that the cost of getting a keyhotee ID with a given trust metric can scale higher than the expected returns from colluding.)

Hosts could then choose what level of trust they'll allow; so false-positive colluders have a place to prove they aren't colluding at the cost of losing money to likely actual colluders.

I don't have a large corpus of poker games to confirm this suspicion, of course.  There is a way we could get such a thing though...
« Last Edit: March 20, 2014, 10:40:58 pm by thisisausername »
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Offline JakeThePanda

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Toast,

I know you have a lot on your plate, but are you still thinking about the possibility of a poker DAC?

Offline Azuos

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I think this is a great idea and would like to add my experience to the conversation.  While I have no idea about the technical aspect of how this could be implemented, I have played a lot of online poker and I can add from that end. 

Collusion is a part of online poker and there is really no way to eliminate it.   I know it happens in all of the online venues as it is very difficult if not impossible to trace.  That being said I don't see collusion as that big a problem if a few precautions are taken.  Rake is very important in helping to minimize collusion, if there is no rake, one person can take 8 hands and play against one person, and this would provide the team a big advantage.  The rake makes this an unprofitable move as as the majority of hands will be played within the team where money is lost in every pot.  Now the team could fold every hand the mark isn't in and avoid the rake but no sensible player will sit under these circumstances for long without noticing. 

For collusion to be effective (in Hold-em, what I am most familiar with) a very specific set of circumstances need to exist to give a team of 2 or 3 an advantage over the table.  Over a vast number of hands there can be some advantage to the team, but thinking that they are going to wipe out a table of decent players where the cards are random is just fantasy.

One thing that would totally eliminate the possibility of collusion would be to implement a game such as Full Tilt's Rush Poker.  In this game player have no control over the table they are seated at and are moved every hand.  With no way of choosing what table you sit at, there is no way to work as a team.