Bitcoin Forum

For the love of God please go "public" with Seals!

Seals has been around for a looooooonnnnggggg time now and it's still dead as shit! The friggin' Sunday night 60 BTC guarantee still doesn't even net profit. The ring games lag ass, too!

It's not because freemoney doesn't rock. He does! It's not because Bitcoin doesn't make poker way cooler. It does! Then why does SealsWithClubs still suck balls?

The one and only reason I can think of is because Seals is running a garbage ass poker client. It's proprietary software. Strike one. It runs on a Windows server. Strike two. The software itself sucks too. Strike three!

I want SWC to succeed for two main reasons. I want to play real fucking poker online like I used to when Full Tilt was still around. And second, I want to see Bitcoin succeed even quicker than it already is. If SWC can become a kickass company, both of my goals will happen as a result.

In my not-so-humble opinion, SWC needs to invest in some seriously kickass poker software. That costs money, more money than he is willing to risk. So, go public on GLBSE. Raise tens of thousands of dollars. Turn Seals into a real company with shareholders, and a board of directors, a CEO, shit, whatever the hell it takes to turn Seals into a vibrant online Bitcoin poker community. Because right now it appears to be going nowhere fast.

Does anybody else out there agree? If so, please speak up! freemoney needs some encouragement!

I would get behind this in a second.

I've played on SWC a few times.. yeah it could definitely use a facelift. but its playable. 

Bridging the gap from Pokerstars player with visa to SWC player with Bitcoin is what's important..  Pulling that off would be game changer..

Hello Daily Anarchist,

Is there any Open Source Poker Software you would recommend to FreeMoney (SealsWithClubs)?

Free and Open Source Software would be the tits, no doubt about it. And really, I think that's the way things are headed eventually anyways. It would help to add a lot of trust to sites if the code were all open source.

This is the only thing I know of. I have no idea why the project died.

https://github.com/hippich/Bitcoin-Poker-Room

It, or something like it, could definitely be implemented with some full-time programmers. There just doesn't seem to be anybody funding it. And I can understand that. Who wants to drop a bunch of money into a FOSS poker client just to see somebody else open up some competition a month after you've paid for it all? But that's not to say it's not possible. On a side note I tend to think that in the future online poker rooms won't charge any rake, but will get all of their money through advertisements appearing on the poker table. Imagine, a new advertisement on the table each hand, but no rake involved. Just get creative!

Personally, I just think it needs to be heavily (and I mean heavily) advertised outside of the Bitcoin realm.  The market for Bitcoin users who play poker is saturated - now it's time to move on to the market for poker players who might be willing to use Bitcoin.

I have no qualms with the software.  It gets the job done, and I never see lag myself.  Why do you hate it so much Daily Anarchist?

The first person to make some bitcoin compatible software that's comparable to full-tilt/pokerstars/etc. will make a shed load of BTC.

The suggestion to get a GLBSE listing going is a good one -we could all invest and reap the rewards  ;D

Do we have enough skills in the community to pull this off and how much would it cost?

I don't mean lags in a delay sort of way, just that it sucks.

Oh ok.  I haven't been involved in any other poker sites, really, so I don't know what I am missing compared to Full Tilt or Poker Stars.  Care to enlighten the uninformed?  What do those popular sites have that seals with clubs does not?

It's probably a case of ignorance - I just don't know that there is better software out there.

Well a while back I was interested in getting a team together to improve on the Holdingnuts opensource poker client but that idea fell through.

The source is freely available on holdingnuts.net so you could improve it wherever you want.

It's really hard to put your finger on, but if you try the PokerStars client, and then try the Seals one, you'll see what he means I think.  The PokerStars client just feels slick.  The games flow smoother, the user experience is just somehow better.  Maybe part of it is that PokerStars is a native app, and Seals is stuck in a browser tab, faking a multi-window environment inside a flash app.  Even running the Windows version of PokerStars in Linux using WINE feels better than the Seals flash app.

This.

Internet poker for real money is mostly a virgin market in the U.S... When people realize that bitcoin as real as real money can get, then this site will be booming... regardless the software IMO.

Marketing is our short and medium term focus. We are testing an affiliate program now, email affiliates@sealswithclubs.eu if you want to help with that.

Poker software is not a simple project, and pouring money in does not guarantee good results. I don't think the tens of thousands that we probably could raise on GLBSE would suffice. I expect better bitcoin poker software will come from someone(s) that have the right skills and are passionate about the project or from some company that already has top quality poker software available to it.

Poker Stars software is superb, I have played several million hands on it and I love(d) it. It cost them millions of dollars and I expect over a million dollars/year to maintain and improve. You can't get that quality for cheap.

I really hope a big player makes it happen before long. I think it is inevitable.

You guys know you can play poker with Bitcoins on SwitchPoker right?

If I recall correctly you can deposit with BTC, and play in USD (or maybe EUR), but can't withdraw in BTC. Not quite the same.

I may be mis-remembering, or things  may have changed since last I checked.

Play is in EUR but you covert whenever you want (I keep my stash in BTC when not playing).  You can withdraw in BTC, but there was a 20BTC minimum last time I was on there.

Fair enough. Thanks for the correction.

If they want to raise funds on bitcoinfunding.com I will allow them to setup a project for a 0% fee.

We've run offshore to non-US players for almost a year, and we've consulted on this with some of the best gaming lawyers on the planet, and here's our unvarnished, and unpopular view:

1. The market among Bitcoiners who occasionally play poker is saturated, as SgtSpike said.

2. Freemoney's right on all counts: Pouring money into a slicker client isn't necessarily going mean an instant gold poker site (see: BTCOnTilt), and really high end poker software does cost millions, or at least hundreds of thousands to develop and refine. I started working on our software 4 years ago and I'm still improving it. I wouldn't claim it's anywhere near the level of PokerStars downloadable product in terms of features & whatnot. It's glossier than Mavens, but Freemoney's beating the shit out of us in terms of player volume. The point is, there is much more to building a successful poker site than having good software. And to be realistic, there isn't enough of a current Bitcoin poker market to justify further feature enhancement or even a mobile client for us at this point... let alone hiring a team to start coding what would be a $250-500k next gen project from scratch.

3. Bitcoin poker can't be profitable until it starts drawing players away from sites that take mainstream deposit methods: People who've never used Bitcoin before. What's the incentive for Europeans to leave Moneybookers and start playing poker for Bitcoins - even if that Bitcoin site has a beautiful $1M poker client? People go where other players are. The entire Bitcoin poker market right now, even though it's almost completely concentrated on Seals, is nowhere near large enough to gain traction to steal players from Stars.

No, the people who will willingly switch to Bitcoin are the ones whose options have run out, because their country has banned online gambling. And in the case of poker, that means Americans.

So the American general public is certainly ripe for *any* site that lets them play poker. They'll jump through any hoops to get Bitcoins and get there, and they don't care what the software looks like (not that much, anyway). And if Seals builds that market sufficiently before a major player steps in with existing, glossy software, they may have enough momentum to stay relevant without ever paying for a software upgrade.

But in order to do this, they would need to start marketing Bitcoin as a new way of playing poker to the American general public, outside of the Bitcoin circuit. This is what the long-awaited Infinitipoker is doing, with big sponsorships and apparently serious investment.

So it's worth asking: If there's this virgin market for American poker players, why is it that PokerStars and Party Poker and Playtech and Microgaming haven't opened up Bitcoin deposits to Americans? In a word: It's probably illegal. And no one in their right mind wants to be the first to test in court the theory that taking Bitcoins for online poker is somehow different than taking Western Union. In all probability, it isn't. A small site with no existing stake in the industry or future Vegas contracts to blow, and which flies under the radar and does not market to mainstream American consumers, may be able to make a bit of cash from the situation over the next 1-2 years before online poker is re-legalized under Vegas ownership in America. They would need to be very careful about not making too much noise, and getting out before the shit hits the fan. A site that has aspirations of becoming the next PokerStars will never, ever make enough money off Bitcoin poker games to finance the legal bill they'll see when the Justice Department comes knocking. Moreover, they will have blown their shot at future legitimacy; they will never be legally licensed in the US at some later date. That is the situation; it appears to be a wide-open playing field, but it's actually empty because all the other players have either been arrested or have already been given a backdoor deal and are waiting for a green light to re-enter the market.

Freemoney is doing the sensible thing. A GLBSE offering - which is probably illegal itself - and mass-marketing to Americans who are the only really viable market who would switch to Bitcoins to play poker right now, would be suicide.

ssaCEO, I don't disagree with what you've said, but here's the thing:

They can't make a bitcoin poker site illegal unless they make "free" poker sites illegal as well.  To do that, they would have to legitimize BTC as a valid currency and as "real" money.  That's the last thing they want to do... so a BTC poker site would be tough to shut down on those grounds, simply because it would open a different can of worms that no one in the current financial industry wants opened.

Not necessarily true.  Some of the state laws I've read indicate that gambling anything of value is illegal online, which would most certainly include Bitcoins.

You raise a good point, which I think this is a common misconception in the Bitcoin community. It's not true that they would have to classify Bitcoin as a form of currency in order for gambling with it to be illegal. In most US states, and Federally, gambling with anything of any value is illegal if it can be exchanged for currency. The US government would never argue that casino chips from Harrahs are legal tender; but you can't start a website where people mail in MGM chips and get chips back, if there is an element of luck involved. The government doesn't make the case that Zynga credits are a form of currency, but Zynga would be violating state and federal law if they allowed a market to evolve in which their credits were traded out for money.

In other words it doesn't need to be "Money" to violate US law. The law prohibits anything with any value being risked on a game of chance if there's a reward. The only loophole is that some states consider poker a game of skill rather than chance; but even those states regulate who runs the games and how they're allowed to do so.

Only games of pure skill, like Gin Rummy, or Chess, or Golf tournaments, are excluded from this. The only other way around it is to either (a) only pay out money (no consideration) or (b) only accept money (no reward). If all three elements are present (consideration, chance, reward) then it's illegal gambling. Regardless of what form the consideration or reward takes.

Again though, they'd have to assign value to Bitcoins, which means they'd have to investigate theft, etc...  Doing anything like that is going to further legitimize Bitcoin and that's something to be avoided in a lot of peoples minds.

Who gives a flying FUCK about the legality of Bitcoin poker? The online poker players sure as shit don't! If there is anything holding those players up from playing Bitcoin Poker, it's their faith in Bitcoin itself.

Throw the site up on Tor, fuck the government, and make boatloads of money.

And don't tell me that couldn't happen. The article I wrote on Silk Road gets over 20,000 hits a month, and growing!

Really I hate to say that things are impossible, but poker behind TOR is pretty close.

Does anyone know any gambling games behind TOR now? Simple ones would be possible, but I suppose there isn't much demand. Though I suppose SD can be played over TOR! And the site could be reposted there easily I'd think.

Still, the government essentially saying that they are worried about Bitcoin and Bitcoin poker and that Bitcoin is valuable would be pretty huge.

It's not the players who have to worry, it's the site operator. Going big to the States is a risk that only makes sense if you make, literally, boatloads of money off it. There aren't boatloads of money in Bitcoin poker. There won't be until someone develops the US market for it. Which means that at the outset, for the operator, there's a long period of high risk exposure with very little payout while they try to develop this market. If they succeed in developing it without a legal challenge, larger players will jump in and take it away from them. If they fail they end up either with no earnings, or worse, in court.

Obviously poker players don't give a fuck about the legality, but investors do. I'm telling you why no big casino has been willing to enter the Bitcoin market. I heard exactly this from the owner of one of the world's biggest sportsbooks. They're watching and waiting to see if the smaller fry get snatched or not.

+1 @freemoney about poker behind being impossible to play behind TOR...

With all that said I think it will take a Zhou Tong type of developer with nothing to lose to make it.

I think playing via email would be more enjoyable than through TOR.

Heh, now I'm thinking about email poker. You could have a site or sites that helped manage your hands, but make it all work via email in case the helper sites got shut down. Super insecure right? Have to train everyone to use GPG. I'm not seriously doing this, it would be ridiculous. Though slow poker in general ought get more love, in a studying sort of way. I guess no one wants to play with people who are obviously training though, would be a pretty flimsy ecosystem.

Legality Issues Aside....... 8)

I'll go outright and say (at risk of being banned from SwC.eu, which I love, because this may violate the ToS or make FreeMoney uncomfortable) that I've already completely reverse engineered the SealsWithClubs PokerMavens client to the point I can actually play from a python command line. What does this mean? Well, they could keep their backend, but I (or someone else) could develop a frontend on ANY platform if they were talented enough. If I made an Android-compatible SealsWithClubs client........ Holy shit. Can you imagine the audience? Shit, people play for hours on "Zynga Poker" or whatever the fuck, but it's all play money.

Only problem is, this little side project of mine was derailed when Diablo III came out :P

But I DO have a working SealsWithClubs client that is entirely controlled via a Python command line. At least, I did a few months ago and I haven't tested it since then. It probably still works, or will still work with a couple tweaks. :)

Translating that to a super simple Android GUI would be trivial to someone experienced with Android and GUI programming IMO, but I have very little GUI or Android programming experience. XD

EDIT: If freemoney requests it, I will send him the sourcecode for the Python Command Line client. It's super simple but super sloppy. There's a packet thread that listens and queues packets to send back and forth, and then there's a packet-parse/display thread, and then there's a command line thread that accepts user input. Most of the work was categorizing all the types of packets the server would send the client.

The server already basically tells the client what its allowed actions are at any given moment at any table, making the client software "dumb" software, meaning it doesn't have to know anything about poker, just what to display to the user.

Android GUI isn't the limitation here. You could use my source-code to develop an AJAX/HTML5 based client even and ditch the terrible Flash client. The beauty is being able to keep the backend the same, which is where all the custom (ie not easily modified without breaking) stuff is.

Or make a desktop client. Cloning PokerStars interface with a working backend can't be that difficult if I managed to create the client-backend in a week or two of work in my spare time.

The only thing complicated the client has is that they encrypt the hands dealt to you so that you need your privatesessionkey to decode them, but this can all be done with a simple SHA256 hash. This was implemented in the latest PokerMavens client update they put up. Or at least, the latest client update they put up a few months ago.

That is fascinating. I'd love to see the code. admin@sealswithclubs.eu is the best way.

I noticed a few months ago that the flash client communicates in plain text with the server, but didn't do anything with it.  I think at the time it was sending my hole cards in the clear too, but maybe that's changed now.

I don't understand what you're talking about when you say you could use sha256 though.

It's still in plaintext like you said, EXCEPT for the hole cards, which are now hashed with sha256 using the private session key the server gives out at the start of the connection. Was very easy to figure out what the client was doing though. As I mentioned, this was implemented with the last client update they did back when I was actively playing.


Check your PMs real quick, and I'll get you a copy of the code. :)

EDIT: Just tested it, and after a couple line tweaks looks like it still works. At least, Lobby Chat works fine. Don't have time to thoroughly test the in-game table commands, but they should be essentially the same as last time I created it. I don't think much changed client-wise/server-wise between "3.00 B7" and "3.00"...

So how does the client know what its cards are if they are sha256 hashed with the session key.  sha256 is a one-way hash.  Does it have to brute-force them?  Seems unlikely, especially for omaha where you have 4 cards, not just 2.

http://www.pokerth.net/
Pretty well poker client under GPL, with Android, Windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS X clients.
Why no one can just take this client and add bitcoin-related features to it? It will rock then.
And I dreaming about times, when I will be able to play poker, with bitcoins, with thousands players on the server, and without a rake (or with 0.5%).

Uhhh... Give me a second, I'll give you an example... Maybe I mis-phrased the way I said it uses sha256?

So the new version of PokerMavens sends your hole cards in a command packet called "ECards". The flash client knows then it must decode the values it receives before displaying them. An example would be I am dealt ECards Card1=7A, Card2=71, Card3=99, Card4=1E, Salt=<16 char hex string>. Those card values are garbage, because they're hashed. For the client to really know what those garbage cards are, it needs to also know the private sessionkey, which is a 20 character hex string established at the beginning of the session.

So without revealing the entire method, the client somehow uses a combination of the sessionKey and Salt together, which it then uses portions of that combination against the garbage card values in a mathematical algorithm, which results in the proper number. Each of these steps may or may not involve an sha256 method that is called (I can't reveal everything!).

For this example (and I didn't give you the Salt or SessionKey so revealing the answer does not reveal the method): The proper numbers would be 48 (Ks) and 14 (5d). Since I was playing Hold'em at the time, Card3 and Card4 either evaluate to 0 or some value greater than 53, which would be a garbage number that the client knows to discard and treat as 0. Valid card values are 1-52, each corresponding to a different facecard.

P.S.: FreeMoney has my sourcecode. :) If he gets a good, experienced programmer on board I honestly believe he could have a decent cross-platform desktop Python client that is close to PokerStars pretty damn quickly. I say this because I do not code as a profession and I learned Python about a month before I started working on the Python SwC client for the 2 weeks or so. If I was a professional coder, I imagine I would have done all this work much faster and more efficiently.

That's if the programmer doesn't want to port it to a better language, which I would highly recommend. Especially one that would port relatively easily to Android/iOS (like Java or C++).

It cannot be understated how "dumb" of a client it actually can be, since the server does so much of the heavy lifting. The server tells the client when to play a sound, when to do the deal animation, etc. The client is basically a rendered table that draws stuff on command, shows buttons on command and lets the server know when/which of the buttons are pressed and what values were typed on the screen at the time of press.

Okay here's a question that's pretty off-topic but still related to the concept. In Diablo 3 where they have the real money auction house that allows you to sell and buy gold for real money. Aren't they technically making their own currency and therefore should be illegal?

Buying and selling virtual goods like WoW gold or Bitcoin isn't illegal in and of itself, and doesn't have any relationship to gambling laws unless there's an element of chance. No government in the world views them as currencies; but they don't have to be currencies in order to be a form of "consideration" or "reward". It's equally illegal to gamble for amazon store credit, Thai Baht, or shoelaces. If there was a game of chance in Diablo where you could risk your gold, with a prospect of winning more gold from the house or from another player, and an element of chance was involved, then it would be tough to argue that they weren't running an illegal online casino.

It's the combination of consideration + chance + reward that makes it illegal. It's not illegal to operate a golf tournament, a poetry contest or a bowling league. An online chess site for Bitcoin would be legal. There are Gin Rummy sites that operate legally in the US for real money, because there's no element of chance in Rummy. All these things take out the element of chance. It's also not illegal to run a poker site with valuable prizes, and make money off of advertising, as long as people can't pay money into it to increase their chances of winning (flat-rate subscription poker sites are a very fuzzy legal gray area and might be legal) - this way you remove the consideration. And it's not illegal if you remove the reward, like Zynga, and take money for poker but don't offer any way to cash out winnings.

Linden Labs faced exactly this situation and had two realistic choices... they could shut down all the in-world slot machines and casinos, or they could prevent people from changing Linden Dollars back into USD. They chose to shut down all the in-world games that had an element of chance.

The PPA argument goes that poker gets around the chance element by being a game of skill over the long term. Unfortunately though, that's not the view of the US Government (yet).

All of those games have chance. Swing at the monster.... miss. Swing at the monster... hit! Monster drops.... a dry bone or a dirty rag or a pile of gold!

The government goes after what the people in government want to go after.

Good point.
Or what the multi-billion-dollar Vegas lobby tells them to go after. I'm not even sure they're aware that you can make money playing Diablo. And then again, they might just attack Bitcoin virtual worlds from a completely different angle, not trying to prosecute them on gambling grounds, but going after them as potential money-laundering hubs instead. The FBI made a reference to that in their leaked Bitcoin report. Since they can't control the payment processors and force AML/KYC that way, they might decide to go after any site that facilitates the exchange of BTC between its users. But that's a much bigger process and one that concerns the whole Bitcoin community. The narrow gambling issue makes an easier target.

If you start from the assumption that the government's just doing Vegas's dirty work, and that the idea is to shut down any possible competition and starve the market before Caesar's Palace Online launches in the US (http://www.onlinecasinoking.com/caesars-palace-harrahs.html) with some kind of ludicrous 15% poker rake, then pretty much anything goes.

Is it worldwide illegal? If an American goes to a coffee shop in Netherlands and buy weed, nobody's going to get prosecuted.
If the site is located in a jurisdiction which does not criminalize online poker, and the operator himself doesn't live in US, would that still be risky to the site operator?

Yes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-17355203

Wow it's great to see this thread.  For those that don't know, I've been working with Freemoney for 10 months or so trying to solve the problems that the contributors in this thread have listed.  It is not an easy fix, and trust me the dedicated group of people (Freemoney first and foremost) that work on this project constantly are working towards these goals.

BTC acceptance with the general population is on the rise.  The poker players are mostly nerds, so they will be some of the first to adopt. 

I promise the BTC community I am helping out Seals in every way I can, and that the team together shares your vision.  After the WSOP we are going to get our asses back in high gear.


IF YOU WANT TO HELP:  please sign up for our beta affiliate program:  https://sealswithclubs.eu/affiliate-area/  and msg affiliates@sealswithclubs.eu with questions.  We need the BTC community to help us hard-core market our site.  If you own a darknet site, plz put our links up and get your 20% shipped to your Seals acct for play or withdraw to a hash of your choosing.

FYI I play the main event day 1C on Monday / wearing my BTC button / SealswithClubs patch as always.  If you are at the WSOP and see me ask me for a seals & BTC button!  I got tons.

Just wanted to say that I just joined and started playing for the first time, and I think the software is great.   Yes it could use more people. I personally got a couple people to start playing, that weren't even interested in Bitcoin itself but more for the poker aspect.  The future looks good.

I can't wait to play in the tourney tomorrow night.

i play on seals all the time. i'm so happy to be playin poker again! i think the market for online us poker play is ready to burst, and if ppl could just see how easy btc was to turn into money and products it would be incredible.

Are you "Fart" by any chance?

He's 'illpoet' on seals.

http://www.sbrforum.com/poker/software/


Apparently they want 75k for their source code.

thanks dooglus! yep i'm illpoet on seals. i keep the same username not so much bc i like it, but that way i nver forget it when i'm logging in.  seals is practically giving away bitcoins right now with all the bonus tournaments and freerolls! and i'm a total fish!

I can make a comparable client in a month for a lot less than that using Python and PySide. That would mean cross-compatibility with other OS as well. Shit, in a few months I could probably learn enough Java to get the Python one ported over to Android. Android can already support QT interfaces (which is what PySide designs GUIs with) afaik.

Well, I'm not a designer, so maybe I'd probably need someone to draw me up mock interfaces to copy over for the GUI, but whoever is doing the web design for the current site would be a good enough candidate for that job. The client would interface with the current SealsWithClubs PokerMaven's server, so nothing on their end would even need to change.

I already sent over a proof-of-concept command line GUI for SwC to FreeMoney as I mentioned in my previous post here... Trust me, it's as simple as coding a GUI and hooking it up to that command-line backend. Coding a GUI that looks identical to PokerStars honestly can't be that hard... There's only a select few dialog-types, and each table is drawn based on a template.

This is not a 75k job. Well, unless you want to overhaul the server end as well (which seems to be working as fine as it can be...). That job would probably be best left up to a professional.

If you want a cost estimate on creating a PokerStars/FTP-like client:
For reference, I work part-time on-call for a construction company and make about 20-30k a year from it depending on how good the construction market is in California. I also go to school part-time. Employing ME for a few months would only take 5-15k. I'm sure there are better individuals cut out for the job than me. Check out outsourcing the client design to India, or get a private contractor to do it!

My guesstimate: 1k-1.5k project tops for an independent contractor who is well experienced to create the client. 3k if you want a client on iOS and Android as well.

It looks like I need a new place to play poker.  :)  I'll see you there...

In my head is the perfect p-2-p client server gaming product.  If there is someone that can Zuckerberg out what is in my head we will make it rain.

Seal Team 6 needs 1 or 2 more badass coders and it's on.  I just busted main event and I promise this is my main focus going forward.

yeah i have got a few non btc poker ppl to play. i think thats where the future lies.  what i did was front a few work buddies .25 btc worth of chips each. that gives them 5 entries into the half hour 100 bonus tournament.  even a marginal player can win/place 1 in 5 to keep afloat, there definately isn't the competition that there is for the big btc.  So far it seems to work and more ppl at work have asked for the site addy. of course those buttholes are from another shift, so they can buy their own damnd btc. 

I've done similar with my poker playing friends. If they need BTC, I'll sell it to them in cash. ;D

yeah xiou, all it took for me was to buy some chips off a friend in cash then word got out and now everyone wants in! (lol i got a few btc out of him at a rlly good rate too!)

Micon, I would also like to help with this.  I don't know much about coding, but I am logical, know basic programming, am a poker player, and also I am physically near by (in Vegas, and actually friends with guys at the studio behind the Palms), so if I can be of assistance to Seals or DD in some fashion, let me know.  I've also been tossing around in my head the logistics of a p2p poker protocol and would be very interested in hearing what you've fleshed out, logistically speaking.

get my cell from the guys behind Palms / always willing to listen to a real guy that wants to help out Seals / DD  :)

I'm a recently retired pro online poker player that played full time for 5 years. I can tell that the poker client and most importantly the advertisement campaign are both keys to a successful poker website. The Seal With Clubs poker client is ugly and inefficient for multi-tabling. They could also try to put some banner or at least start a support/suggestion thread on http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com ;)

EDIT: I would gladly buy some share on GLBSE.

+1 Finally some vindication!

I hate to say it but it sounds like Infiniti Poker is going to destroy SWC market cap once they come online, because they'll be offering buyins and cashouts in bitcoin.

I've made a thread on 2+2, they remove them unless you pay a fairly large amount in advertising fees. Some of my posts have been removed from other generic bitcoin threads and some stay.

If other people really want to talk about it over there I'm sure something will stick eventually, so please try. And point us to it.

Wow this is sad  :(

It's unfortunate, but it is their site, and they must be doing something right. As we and bitcoin build credibility people will talk, they just weren't going to let us take a shortcut.

Pocket Fives did the same thing. I even got a PM saying that talking about Bitcoin was not allowed, this was almost a year ago though.

They're probably afraid to be accused of facilitating money laundering from the US government.

Freemoney, have you done or gotten anyone to work with the client proof-of-concept I gave you from a few weeks back?

I'm looking at possibly getting back into full-time work for the next few months at my on-call job, but that usually means I'll have a lot of "paid" down-time in the office. That means if I have spare time, I'm considering picking up working on a Python/PySide-based client for Seals with Clubs for fun again. I only choose the Python/PySide route because it allows me to rapidly prototype, and I know *most* of that stuff compared to the Java route.

If you've got an artist that can draw mock-ups of an ideal Seals with Clubs GUI for:

• Lobby Chat
• Ring Lobby
• Tournament Lobby
• Tables

That would be very helpful. I'm not an artist myself and new to GUI programming, but having something to shoot for would let me code towards a goal.

P.S. Are we confident Infiniti Poker is going to take out Seals with Clubs when it comes to Bitcoin poker? Their front-page sure looks pretty... But that's all I've seen so far. ;)

They're running beta testing open to the public. All you have to do is sign up for their newsletter and you'll get an invite. I got an invite but I refuse to run Windows in order to run the poker client.

SEALS FOR REALS.   :-*

Such a man of principle

Logged into seals yesterday for the first time.  I was impressed and I love that the flash client works on my MacBook!  Kudos for the site owner  :)

One thing that is missing is that there is no Short handed tables or 6 player tables, please add this feature...

i play mtts for a living so i thought i could add this mtt to my regular schedule...how to do this?

1)i can't take notes or color bad players so mtting 12 more tables and this cannot be done cause ill just play blind

2)the f***** window must stay inside the browser ..try multitabling with this!!!

so...

XXX FAIL

in my opinion poker websites with bitcoin funding method do have a hard time because there are to few players out there. and there is another huge point you may be missing: i know a pro online poker player and the most time he gets money from newbies and guys which dont know what they are doing. i dont think there are "stupid" people in the bitcoin network because you have to be "smart" to know bitcoins, get bitcoins and handle bitcoins ;)

that was oddly irrelevant  ???

also if ur going to break , break when all sites do at :55!!!

Hey, snowboard, it isn't good for playing at another site I know, sorry about that. If you can spare the screen room you could reduce the size of the browser and the table inside the browser.

Sorry about the breaks too, we can only set it according to blind rounds right now and 55 is awkward to hit that way, but I'll keep it mind and maybe we can get the system changed.

A lot of the play on the site is actually shorthanded at the full tables. Since there are not many running games it seemed wrong to keep people waiting on those occasions. When we grow enough to support 6 and 9 we will add them. There are 6max SNGs available now.

There are HU tables, but the rake is half (via weekly rakeback) for playing HU and 3 handed at the full tables since it helps us for you to start them. If a table does get filled and you want there is another table at most stakes.