Bitcoin Forum

I used to play a once a month poker tournament in college, and I was thinking it be fun to get back into that and I have a lot more time. My friend showed me some open source poker software that would make it easy to setup a server and accept bitcoins and maybe even have some free games going. Anyone interested?

Make it.

I am interested.

I would love something like this.  It definitely is nice finding a good site to play a game of poker here and there.

If you wanted to as well, you can just keep the rake and use it for special bonuses for a monthly tournament, or something like that.

Yeah sounds good. What's the buy in gonna be?

It really depends on what is the price, if it is really high like 10 BTC. why not?

I would be very interested in this, sort of like a cool "poker club"  Every week, I'll deposit up to about a hundred bucks to get a seat, I think that's pretty fair.

Sure, Ill play as long as its withing my budget.

would this be legal?

You should ask seals to add a private poker room. Pokerstars does this.

EDIT: So you can have invite only rooms and deal with bitcoin or free.

I personally think the time is right for an open source poker client/server. I wonder if any exist?

Yes. http://www.cubeia.org/index.php/poker

Yes if its free and it has high prizes...

high prizes is always fine fine but also with small entrance fee would be acceptable, IMHO

I will play. Keep us updated. :)

Online poker in and of itself is not illegal in most of the US, however, playing for real money is. Since BTC is not recognized as legal tender, you can get around it.

I'm always interested in finding more poker games to play. Will this client or web-based (or both)? I favor client based because it's easier to do other things and not miss your turn...

Best of luck, keep us updated.

I'll have to wait and see what the agreed buy in will be but I'm interested for sure.  I some of you guys got a crap load of coins and money is no object lol but I don't roll like that.

Sounds like this is a little bigger then I originally assumed which is very good news!  I really look forward to learning more as things develop around your plan.

BitsPoker already has a .005 BTC Buy-in every week tournament with a .5 BTC Guaranteed prizepool. Why not give them your business instead of reinventing the wheel? A bunch of copy cats doesn't do anything useful for the community.

Might I suggest you look at my attempt to make it provably fair? I can't code, so I never made a client/server. I have a thread in the games and rounds subforum. But no one played.

I will be up for once a week online poker tournament but for the next year ;)

This is one of the reasons why I am building from scratch, this will not be feature for a while, but I making it very easy to implement this is something if sites are using poker mavens can't build in. They protect the shuffling.

Hell yes.

Make it happen

i am down

Some really cool updates and some bad news. Bad news first I really wanted to launch this site for january 1st obviously didn't do that. So for the good news, for the next week or two I will be putting my head down and just finishing this thing. It is pretty much done, just that their are some bugs that cause weird things to happen and the poker server crashes. I did allow some selected people to play on the site (just my dev server, using a service to forward it to the public, so it can't hold a full on beta test) they enjoyed it and really had fun.

Now for some FAQ questions answered that are either pmed or emailed to me.
Q: Is this just poker mavens software packaged again?
A: No diss to the other poker sites, but poker mavens software is great for a small home table game, this will be all custom. I am looking to give people a better experience. Like I wanted but was unable to find. I am on a mac so downloading software was always just for windows, and poker mavens is a horrible interface. I am aiming to make this easy to use and easy to setup for future people using this.

Q: Will this be open sourced?
A: At some point the client will be opened sourced so people can hack on it, make it bigger and better. Then the server, but this is very far down the road.

Q: Can people apply for the license to run their own instance of this software?
A: Yes, and people have already just understand that there's currently no price set and this could take around 6 months to get it to that point.

Q: Can you give us a framework of how the software operates?
A: The client and site use php, with jquery to make it real time of what games are open and tables are running and tournaments that are about to begin. It has a custom written java websocket server that is the middle man for all the games. I view the client as just a portal to the game, it doesn't do any heavy lifting.

Q: Are you working on this to be provably fair?
A: Yes! I want this to be the first poker site to be provably fair, is this going to happen in the first release no, but I already have a design for it.

Q: What will be the rake?
A: Rakes haven't been set yet, but they will be low, this venture isn't really out to make a lot of money. It is just that I can't find good poker software. I do have a time length that I want this site to be breaking even, and pay for it's own servers but that is my job and I know how to do that ;).

Q: Were you contacted by another poker site in Las Vegas, that was interested in bitcoins? << Not a real question that I was asked. Just news I threw in ;)
A: Yes I was, they saw my post and actually had a meeting with me, and I was able to demo it. I explained bitcoins to them they were interested, we also talked about other players in the space. They unfortunately due to the legal grey area didn't really want to endorse what I am doing, but were interested in bitcoins. I had an amazing talk about how bitcoin can really change the shape of poker and bankrolling.

So that is the end of this bit of news. Remember follow the twitter by going to http://dryaces.com

This is fantastic! let do that!

Sounds great gweedo, good luck with the poker site. It would be nice to have something other than poker mavens for a change.

I agree, Cubeia is great however unless you plan on purchasing the heavy duty commercial license... You can't customize anything. I went down this route to create a poker site and its a pain in the ass. Easy to set up but you need the commercial if you want to accept bitcoin and customize.. Thats from my experience. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way if you do get it setup I would partake.


edit: if you need help setting it up, let me know. I had to fumble with it a bit before it worked.

Yeah they told me for a license they wanted $4000 up front and 10% of my revenue so yeah, building this on my own is so much better.

SwC would gladly host something small and guarantee an amount.

We can call it a "Bitcointalk Weekly" and I'll bet it will draw.  If someone wants to keep records that's always fun and we can award $100 bees brothers honey caramels and other honey-goodies basket for the 3-month champion or something like that.

I'm open to ideas / SwC is certainly here to serve this community and if it wasn't implicit we can do this tourney rake-free.

Any updates on the poker room?

So you're opening a decentralized USD / Bitcoin exchange???  :o

Well A few ideas!
1. Some % of the buy-in to the tournament should go to the monthly server fee
2. Another % of the buy-in should go to a free roll once a month where players are automatically registered if they play in any tournament!