Bitcoin Forum

"Switchpoker.com, the world's first real money online poker site compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, today announces it is the first real money poker site to offer the revolutionary virtual currency Bitcoin as a deposit and payment method.

Bitcoin is a distributed currency that operates without any central point (such as a bank) and without any governmental control. It is very much like gold is in the offline world. Bitcoins can be exchanged from one person to another directly, anonymously and without fees."

Here's their site, they have some awesome software!

Great news for Bitcoins!

https://www.switchpoker.com/

For the lulz.

Great news - proof of concept for a "normal" business to integrate Bitcoin with legacy systems.  Really exciting  ;D

I wish switchpoker.com (http://switchpoker.com) accepted US based players.

I think that is the next big step.

It would be a much bigger deal if they took US players. Euro players have little reason to use bitcoin over standard deposit methods. US players don't have standard deposit methods available.

  Great news.
  How is conversion between Bitcoin and Euro done?
  There is a refference to bitcoin 24/7 who are they? I hope it's got nothing to do with the defunct bitcoin7.
  May additional identification be required for Bitcoin withdrawals? How is excahnge rate set for that? Is it the same rate
for deposit and withdrawals? If not, what's the spread?

Great news! Any idea how much traffic they have? Also, won't US based players be able to play (with a vpn of course) since they can now deposit/withdraw with BTC?

How are they supposed to know you are a US based player, specially if you pay with bitcoins? Proxies are cheap. I think that is what they are really aiming at.

Yes, I think so, too. With anonymized IP and bitcoin payments, everybody can use their site without any problems, however they probably don't announce that in this way officially :-).

Btw are there some proxies4btc?

I've been waiting for this. As a semi-professional poker player I've thought highly of the gambling potential of Bitcoin. This is the beginning.

So basically, they're using bitcoin to dodge the "Do not use US currency for online poker sites" law that was introduced a while back. So yet again another shady internet buisness with questionable legal status is dragging bitcoins name into the mud.

Exactly. Plausible deniability.  They can comply w/ US laws & regulations meanwhile technology being what it is (VPN proxy & Bitcoin) make it possible for Americans to circumvent any restrictions.

Of course anyone expecting them to say anything other than the "official line" on the website is naive.

I think they are hoping to avoid this awesome new logo.

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/doj-banner.jpg?1

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/us/

If the DOJ can take down full tilt poker ($5B company throwing off >$200M a year in free cashflow annually) they can take down this small player if they step even a inch over the line.

US players have always been able to deposit/play using VPN.  What made it difficult was cashing out.  Bitcoin solves that.

As far as BTC-only plays.  There is no interest from the regular/grinder community.  The margins in pro-poker are very small.  Grinding out tiny profits on each hand.  If you are playing in BTC and make a 10% profit for the month and then BTC:USD value falls 70% kinda makes it impossible to make a living.  The regulars drive traffic, and that makes it so the fish can play when they want (a game is always available 24/7/365 anywhere in the world).  That is how the economics of poker work.

NO.  They are speaking out for freedom against an oppressive regime.

Pretty much.  Although it's purely profit motivated and not some altruistic move, it still has the same effect.  As a US citizen, I am absolutely appalled by what our nation and government does most of the time.  One of the main reasons I am permanently emigrating to Australia.  On behalf of intellectually and morally mature citizens of America, I apologize for our behavior.

But, on the flip side... Fulltilt poker was a giant, festering, money grubbing, cheating, lying sack of corporate shit and I am glad they got smashed. 

Do it work also on Android or is iCrap only?  ::) i i i i, like the world is only i  ::)

Agreed but sadly they brought down $300M worth of player deposits with them.   Hopefully the POS law will eventually be repealed.  The greatest hipocracy.

Online lotto sales = legal
Online horse racing = legal
Online poker = OH NOES OH NOES ban it. 

Oh shit they moved offshore and took all that money, jobs, and tax revenue with them.   Ok BAN money transfers.  Ok they got around that.  Ok spend even MORE money investigating & prosecuting them.

Just legalize, regulate, and tax it.  That goes for plants and poker.

I totally agree... $2500 of that $300M was mine!  Actually, FTP had already stolen it by then by "freezing" my account, so I couldn't withdraw it.  Screw them.

It's so ridiculous the lengths the US government goes to to crack down on things that can't be stopped AND/OR make no difference anyway.  Lotto is a lot more gambling than poker is.  At least in poker, you have some measure of control depending on your skill level. 

I totally understand, good luck in Aussieland :).  Besides family and friends, the only thing keeping me from reconsidering where I live is the idea of what happens if all the intelligent people leave.  Lowering the average IQ of the nation with the largest military doesn't seem prudent.  No, I'll stick around and keep beating my head against the wall.  One day either it will crack or I will, but I refuse to give in or run away.

They can get round this by offering BTC hedging like Silk Road does.

You're appalled that they would possibly try and protect american's from what are generally regarded as corrupt and illegal business and business practices, and then go on to name one company that was notably corrupt and ethically bankrupt and still say it's bad that the government could possibly want to shut them down.

Banning something doesn't help you regulate it.  It just pushes it further out of the reach of the law.

The only entity more corrupt that Full Tilt Poker in this scenario is the US govt.

1) Full Tilt Poker and other off shore sites only exist because the US govt tries to legislate morality.  Given the choice between playing at a Nevada Gaming commission licensed poker room or "some rock I never heard of " licensed (wink wink -> bag of cash) poker room the choice is clear.

2) The US govt created the financial success of companies like FTP by driving all the money offshore where they could neither regulate nor control it.

3) Even then the US govt didn't give two craps about protecting the players.  They shutdown FTP to continue the moral crusade again "sin industries".

4) If the govt cared about protecting players they would simply make online poker legal and regulated in the US.  Brick & Mortar poker rooms are required to segregate player funds and are subject to suprise audits by state gaming boards.  Ever heard of a US physical casino losing player funds or not being able to pay all chips in full.  No?  The reason why is it is more profitable to be "legit" then try to cut corners w/ state gaming board looking over your shoulder.

In essence the govt made their very problem they "solved" and at tremendous expense to both taxpayers and banks (who just pass those costs on to consumers/taxpayers).  Even worse it isn't "solved" for every FTP they killed 4 new poker rooms spring up.  Kinda like how drugs are just as available after a 30 year "war on drugs" (yet another attack on sin industries).

So sorry not going to give the utterly corrupt and hypocritical US govt a pass on this one.

Most of the business practices they shut down are illegal only in the US.  They routinely apply misguided, ignorant, insulting, unwanted, unreasonable, irrational laws to countries and businesses that do not fall under their jursidiction. They then pressure outside entities through various means to get those questionable "laws" applied to the businesses they want shut down.  

Now that I've risen to your bait, let me explain why your statement is a straw man.

You knew, or at least should have known (by the fact that I intentionally singled out FTP at the end), that my statement was applied in a much more broad sense than just to FTP.  In this specific context, you could apply to just only poker, online gambling, or even areas of interest outside of online gambling, but in either case(s) you did not and chose to apply it to FTP specifically - there's your straw man.  

That said, yes, I am absolutely appalled that we, the US, tries to apply our idiotic views on morality on other nations while we can't even get a handle on our own.  I am appalled by the religious right that seems to be in a dominant position applying their fundamental views on my as a citizen of a supposedly free country and especially on others who are NOT citizens.  At least I, as a citizen, can choose to not be a citizen of a morally bankrupt, governmentally corrupt country.  Others, in other countries, don't even have that luxury.  In the case of online poker sites, as has already been said, Lotto is legal in just about all 50 states, which is gambling in it's purest form - yet poker isn't?  

In this specific context, my problem is with the fact that the government presses these "war on X" under the guise of protecting people or morality, when in fact it's purely driven by greed of the players involved, or worse, by the religious right thinking they need to press their laughable, socially juvenile, imaginary friend views on everyone else.  In either case, don't press the laws as some upstanding push for morality or decency... admit the reasons behind doing it.  The government won't admit the reasons because the people would rebel if the law makers, lobbyests, etc... admitted openly it was purely for profit.  Instead they have to hide behind lies and facades to push their agenda.  THAT is morally bankrupt.  THAT is corrupt.  THAT is ethically bankrupt.  

They did not shut down FTP to protect Americans from anything - they shut down FTP because they were competition and they weren't getting their cut of the pie.  Just look to Lotto for your proof - the government gets a large portion of that largess, so it's "legal."

This is big news.  Someone needs to get on top of making this, but a US version.  Gambling is going to keep Bitcoin afloat if people will get on top of it quicker.   I think maybe some of these people who created these BTC gambling sites should start approaching the established big name poker sites to see if deals can be worked out.  Sell your companies to them for the greater good of Bitcoin.

You can use Switch Poker from the US just use a VPN.  If you think any real company is going to advertise it is open for US players in violation of the UIGEA think again.

The long arm of the DOJ is something most companies don't want to mess with.  Party Poker closed access to US players.  Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars didn't.  They did fine until the DOJ decide to seize hundreds of millions of dollars and slap them w/ multi billion dollar lawsuits as well as request US courts forfeit all assets used in or were the direct result of the crimes (in reim forfeiture).

PokerStars will likely survive ... barely.  The fact they used segregated accounts and had sufficient liquidity helped them survive that massive blow to their cashflow.  Full Tilt Poker will survive in name only with original investors wipe out (which they should be the thieving bastards). 

Thinking any well capitalized company will advertise "Open to US players in direction violation of federal law" is a pipe dream.  Hopefully in the future the UIGEA will be repealed until then there are VPN services.   

It's great to see a pre-existing poker site add Bitcoin support.

I've tried this out, and the exchange rates between BTC and Euro seem pretty reasonable.
It allows you to convert between Euro and BTC at will.

I think they really need to be a bit more transparent on fees and exchange rates though - it's pretty much try it and see what you get at the moment.
I just got 1.15 BTC for 2.23 Euro  when the mtgoxEUR was 1.91

They use bitcoin247.com for the deposit/exchange service. I haven't seen much written about them here, and I can't see an entry for them in bitcoincharts but so far so good.

Also a warning.. although you can deposit as little as 3BTC  - the minimum you can withdraw is 20BTC :(

I don't think there's really a good excuse for that given that BTC is so easy to transfer. It's simply a tactic to make you gamble your remaining money away, and I hope that competitors will come along who allow you to withdraw your bitcents, and force switchpoker to match this policy.

Edit: It also seems to me that you could purchase BTC by Visa using this system. I haven't tried it - but I don't see why it wouldn't work. They allow up to 500Euro visa deposit.

I think it is baby steps.  Remember this isn't a "bitcoin company" which has been using Bitcoin from Day 1 and is a fatantical supporter.  This is an online gaming company who seems bitcoin as a potential competitive advantage.

I would expect (hope) that over time their Bitcoin interface improves.  I see no reason once a company becomes use to Bitcoin that they can't allow direct transfers to/from private wallet and w/ lower minimums.

You don't even need a VPN.  When you sign up, just give you country of residence as something other than the US.  I've already won 30 Euro with a 10 BTC deposit.  The fish are large at Switchpoker.

Interesting.  I assumed they would (like every other poker room) be using some geo-location databases to filter US players.  Might check it out tonight.

Nope... at least not so far.  Kinda nice you can play it on your smartphone, too, since it's all web driven... but the interface is kind of clunky, sadly.

Just wondering, can you play SN&G or tournaments with switchpoker? (Didn't bother to check the site, but just asked in case anyone reading this thread knew)

lotto is ok because it depletes you of your money (your purchasing and voting power)
from that POV poker is also ok,
but problem with poker is that it makes you smarter, raises your level of awareness,
and they surely don't want THAT in their backyard,
therefore, it is illegal...

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to waste money, poker is not the only option.  Why doesn't the US gov't just ban LIFE?

Because LIFE is for patenting.

Stick with your Bitcoin poker room of choice... whether it's us, or Seals or BTCOnTilt, we need you support. Word is SwitchPoker only cashes out during business hours, sometimes 24+ hours later, and has a minimum $20 withdrawal.

Anyone outside the US can come on StrikeSapphire, day or night, and play in a freeroll; they open up as soon as the last freeroll started and you can open six windows at the same time. They're cheap - about 0.5 BTC each - but only take 4 players to start. Come support us. We need the xo luv.

And our software, which is original, is a hell of a lot nicer.

Because they make their money the 'legal' state run lotto gambling way, no need to allow everyone to play multiple games to lose their money and have fun with it, the US enjoys the slowly killing our citizens with a weekly drawing to ensure there is only one winner a week, rather than many in a day.

Well, Seals uses the Poker Mavens software, which I absolutely detest.  There is something fishy about the software - not only on Seals, but any site I've ever used that has Poker Mavens, there's some janky shit that happens with the cards.  Normally I would chalk it up to me being a crappy player that night or some other, explainable reason... however somehow I always manage to turn a profit at other places, but never on a Poker Mavens backed site... and it's happened on multiple different sites that run Poker Mavens as their poker room back end... so I've pretty much settled on avoiding any site with Poker Mavens.

I'd love to hear freemoney's take on this.  Perhaps he'd also be willing to switch software.  I don't like Poker Mavens because it's flash and won't work on an iPhone (unless you jailbreak).

Next time buy a decent phone that run things

Not getting into that one. :)  I dislike flash for many reasons, I really had no need to mention Apple.

From what I've heard, pokermavens doesn't let operators have much access, and they seem to run pretty tight software.  I doubt it's rigged to screw over some particular player.

Is it a shitty piece of software? Definitely. But I mean, not much available on the iphone (switch, etc) in HTML5 is going to look or play much nicer. Mavens is flash, but it's really bad flash. Just like switch runs really mediocre javascript. Good flash, or good browser java, looks like a downloadable product and often performs just as well or better. I used to love playing on pokerroom.com before it got taken down by the US gov. That was all Java. I've tried to get some of that feel into the games on Sapphire. Either way, if you want to play a decent poker game, it's either going to be flash or it's gonna be an .exe download, because nothing in javascript looks very nice.

I guess that's something that needs to change.

It does. It won't for awhile, but I wrote a piece of code (http://strikedisplay.blogspot.com) last year that takes the first steps toward converting Flash-like code to Canvas without having to light things up pixel by pixel. There are a few other packages out (Grant skinner literally ripped mine off directly to build easel.js, and there's rumor of a falconjs that Adobe's giving to Apache to be the ultimate Flash-to-JS converter)...but although I can code some mean ass Javascript, I recognize that the engines still aren't up to the task of giving rendered graphics downloadable or flash- or java-like quality in the browser. Which is important for gambling, especially games like roulette, craps, anything with a lot of animation. Or even nice card animations. Even though it would be barely possible now to port one game at a time from Sapphire's flash code to Javascript, it would run like a hog on an iphone, no matter how perfectly optimized it was. The javascript canvas and webkit engines are just not as efficient as the AVM2/AS3 virtual machine, or the JVM. Let alone native code.

It does have to change, and it will get there. But if the reason you don't like Flash has to do with all the annoying banner ads, it's going to get worse, because Flash almost never actually crashes a browser, but Javascript crashes them all the time. The more of those banners move away from Flash and into JS/HTML5, the slower the web is going to get.

Ten years from now it won't matter, because Javascript 2 is basically Flash anyway, and HTML6/JS2 will resemble what Flash is now pretty closely. In the meantime, it's either smooth graphics on the desktop, or shitty graphics and works on an iphone.

The animations for a poker game could be done with Javascript animations, I don't think canvas is needed.

just tried your site. looks nice. would look nicer with players.

btw arent freerolls usually kinda eh...free?  ???

They're free  :-\
Yeah, more players would be nice. We haven't focused on poker, but we've been running these since we opened in July. Poker isn't a money maker outside the US market, especially if you're just looking at Bitcoin.

@btc_artist, yeah cards and chips can all be done with js-animated divs, that's what switchpoker does. Looks great, too.

Edit: @ fornit -- When I said "they're cheap" I meant, the payout's around 0.5 BTC per freeroll. They're free to join, of course.

I think it behooves well on the bitcoin community members to keep playing at the reputable native bitcoin services like Strike Sapphire, etc.

Why?

Cashouts in normal online poker rooms are a pain in the ass.  99.99999% of Poker players have less than zero interest playing in a currency which sometimes drops in value more than 40% in a day. However if Bitcoin ever gains more widespread adoption in "traditional" online poker rooms it could be a massive increase in the usage of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.  

To put it into perspective last year (we know this because Full Tilt Poker has been sued by DOJ) FTP had cashflow in the range of $500M a year.  FTP was ~33% of the global market.  That puts global cashflow for online poker @ ~$1.5 billion per year.

Most of that is done via courrier checks, slows as shit bank transfers, VISA/MC, etc.  Poker rooms also rack up huge losses due to fraud If Bitcoin could get even 1% of that it could be the killer app. However no "reg" is going to play in Bitcoins.  Don't believe me take a trip to the 2 plus 2 forums and ask.  The massive volatility swings make it more gambling than playing poker.  You can have a winning day/week/month and have it all wiped away because the price on Mt.Gox drops 10%.  

"regs" create the critical mass that brings in fish.  If you are an unskilled player when you go to a poker room and 24/7/365 you can get a game at any stakes you want that drives adoption.  The thing sucks the most about online poker is moving money..... something Bitcoin just happens to be perfectly suited to solve.

If the "native Bitcoin" services want to gain traction allow conversion of funds into USD or EUR and get all the tiny poker rooms together working on a single network so it has a chance at real traffic.  Hire some "regs" to generate action and move this this into something real.