This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from February 2004 and lives here forevermore.

Online Poker

“The online poker place that has an open connection protocol will make a killing. Let the masses write clients for you, rather than providing your own crappy ones.”

I promised to expand on that quote, which I made on IRC earlier, and here I am. First of all some background. This came up during a conversation about various forms of online poker. I mentioned WRGPT, the email competition I’ve been involved in for the last 5 months, while Marc brought up that he’s currently successfully playing for real money at Pacific Poker. At that point I complained that Pacific Poker don’t have a Mac OS X client to play with. It’s Windows or nothing.

Before you start thinking that I just have it in for Pacific let me clarify. Most of the online poker rooms lack Mac clients. Some offer Java interfaces, such as Pokerroom. One I know of, Poker School Online does actually have a Mac client much to its credit. Despite this, the quality of the clients I’ve used and seen has been woeful in the main. What of it I hear you say? Well let me tell you what I would like to happen.

We need an online poker site with an open protocol for communicating with it. The site should implement the server end of the protocol and maybe provide a client of it’s own. The advantage of this is that because the protocol is open developers can develop their own interfaces to the server. People will put their own time into providing interfaces to the server. The site saves on the bother of developing and maintaining it’s own client, if it so desires. Various clients will spring up allowing users to choose between them looking for the one that suits them.

Those of you used to playing chess online will recognise the idea. Internet Chess Club and FreeChess.org have been operating on the same basic principle for many years. Each operates slightly differently, but each has an open protocol and allows anyone to write an interface. This has resulted in clients for a wide variety of platforms such as the gorgeous Chessic for Mac OS X.

The system isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than the poker one. Poker rooms are clearly trying to make money, and who can blame them. I just believe that the first one to let developers write interfaces to them, and to keep an open protocol, will corner a vast section of the online poker market, probably by attracting new players as much as encouraging existing players to move.

If this were to happen the first step would be to generate a protocol for interfacing to the server. Protocols do exist, such as the Internet Poker Protocol and the Online Poker Protocol, although each has shortcomings. It may be an idea to extend one of those, or it may be a better idea to start from scratch. I can’t be alone in thinking online poker could take a leap forward, can I?