Hey,
I'll keep this short but I know some of you are interested in Poker. We're a group writing Poker software and this might interest some of you. It's the text we spammed to various Poker websites.
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Everyday 200k play on PokerStars. After the day's end, PokerStars has netted a nice $1.34 million. They give themselves a nice pat on the back while the players have been exploited. Running a Poker site is not a high-cost expense.
Rake distorts the games. Without rake, a losing player might be breakeven, a breakeven player a solid winner and a winner is a MASSIVE winner. People move up faster leading to more fish at higher stakes benefiting the whole Poker economy.
Even with the huge sums taken out of the games by the sites, they still offer shoddy service in return. PokerStars gives you a couple of TV tournaments and a piecemeal updates to their software. Cake Poker gives you atrociously bad security; any programmer can tell you how easy it is to secure your software using programming that is free on the net.
We're proposing a
community run Poker room. The software will be completely free/open so anyone can inspect it to make improvements. Because eyes of the whole Poker community will be fixed on it, flaws & security problems very quickly disappear. And if you wish to make your own Poker room then you can! As the server code is also free & open.
We've been working on this rake-free Poker room. For those interested there is
an online meeting between Poker players at 22:00 GMT (5PM EST) on Thursday Dec 16th in #pokerface on Freenode. For anyone not familiar with IRC you can join the chatroom here:
http://pastecoin.com/cgi-bin/irc.cgiIf you're interested in this project but won't be able to make the meeting, don't worry about it. The meeting will be logged and posted on the wiki. Even if you're not a developer we need regular poker players to tell us what they want so please attend and voice your thoughts.
See you there!
--- some screenshots of our work so far ----
