# Alex Scott: full text of the essays > Every essay on https://scott.co.im, as plain text, newest first. Each one gives its address and date. # What I Know About Poker URL: https://scott.co.im/book/ Poker is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Becoming a consistent winner takes effort and dedication. In this revised and expanded 2027 edition of the book, I explain: - How to use Expected Value, Pot Odds, Position, and the principle of Tight-Aggressive play to make good decisions - How to transform your No Limit Hold’em game in five simple steps - How to play Five Card Draw, Lowball Draw, Triple Draw, Badugi, Five Card Stud, Seven Card Stud, Razz, Stud Eight or Better, Chicago, Super Stud, Omaha, Omaha Eight or Better, 5 and 6-Card Omaha, Double Flop Hold’em and Omaha, Courchevel, Short Deck Hold’em and Chinese Poker – including basic strategy guides and dealing tips for each variant - How to play when the river is dealt - What to do when you play your first live tournament - When to pass up close gambles in tournaments - How to avoid common bet-sizing mistakes - How to use Fold Equity - When to bet into a dry side pot - How to play when your opponents straddle - How to use the ‘squeeze play’ - What solvers and game theory optimal (GTO) play mean for your game, and why exploitative play still earns most of the money - How to play Spin & Go tournaments, and how to manage their variance - How bounties change your decisions in knockout, progressive knockout and mystery bounty tournaments - How to use M and the Independent Chip Model (ICM) to make better decisions in Sit & Go tournaments - How HUDs, real-time assistance and bots affect online poker today, and how to choose where to play - How to use tells and your opponents’ mannerisms when playing live poker - How the Tight-Aggressive and Loose-Aggressive styles evolved - How to avoid common ‘robotic’ and predictable plays - How to play when you are card dead - How to use the metagame to your advantage - How to avoid results-oriented thinking, and how to keep good records - Why Nietzsche Was Right About Poker - How superstition hurts your game, and how you can best use intuition The book includes 11 quizzes to test your knowledge of the material covered. One of the most comprehensive poker guides available, What I Know About Poker is a must-have for any player’s library. Hardcover · 296 pages · Published 24 October 2026 · ISBN 978-0956715159 Buy the 2027 edition --- # I Vibe Coded a Real Casino Game (Part 6) URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/04/02/i-vibe-coded-a-real-casino-game/ Published: 2 April 2026 Previous articles in this series: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4 · Part 5 You might have noticed that the last five posts in this series were called ‘Can I Vibe Code a Real Online Casino Game’, while this one is called ‘I Vibe Coded a Real Casino Game’. As I explained in the last post, I’ve discontinued further work on PlinkoVibe, my entirely vibe-coded casino game, because through the process of building it, it became blindingly obvious that vibe coding a casino game was definitely possible, and I wasn’t even the first person to do it. So now, I am working with a small group of friends to commercialise and launch a casino game idea. Will we succeed? We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks. This article is not about that new game, but about what I’ve learned in the process. ## Quick Recap Using Cursor and various LLMs, I was able to build: - A casino game front-end, ‘PlinkoVibe’ – https://plinkovibe.scott.co.im - A basic remote gaming server (RGS) and maths model - A basic player account management (PAM) system The three parts were built separately, and hosted on different infrastructure, to be reasonably faithful to how a real casino game would be designed. I didn’t take the easy route of building everything in the front-end, because the goal was to go in-depth on how feasible it is to build casino games with AI, and to draw reasonable conclusions from this – and that can’t be done without a model which at least approximates real conditions. In the process, I found some things surprisingly easy and others surprisingly hard. Here’s what I learned. ## What Was Easy I’m focusing here on things that were easy for me personally, so this list might be atypical. I’ve worked in the gaming business for a long time, and understand the mechanics of gambling games really well. Plus my background is in tech. But I still think these conclusions are interesting. - Building an initial prototype was incredibly easy. Once I had the idea to start with Plinko (because it’s simple, and I enjoy playing it) I simply had to research the game – much of which I outsourced to Perplexity – and then use Cursor in Planning mode to sketch out the implementation. I am not exaggerating when I say that within 2 hours of work, about 80% of the entire project was complete. AI is incredibly good at prototyping and MVPs. Of course – the game looked awful, and there was another major issue I’ll come to later. But this part is so simple anyone can do it. - Building a simple RGS and PAM was surprisingly easy. There were two factors that helped here. The first is that casino systems are surprisingly well-documented online, and so AI had a mountain of context that it could refer to in designing the systems. The second is that both an RGS and a PAM are fairly typical back-end systems from a software engineering perspective. Many of the architectural considerations (security, performance, etc) apply to many other types of computer systems, and as such the general principles of systems architecture apply to them as well. There’s devil in the detail here of course. A real RGS needs to do a lot more than mine does, at a much larger scale, and would therefore be a lot more complex than the one I built. - Maths. Historically, developing gambling maths typically meant building a maths model in a spreadsheet (or maybe Python, if you were really advanced), and tinkering with the model for hours upon hours until you achieved the right RTP, volatility, prize distribution and so on. This process could be incredibly time-consuming and frustrating, as you changed one variable after another to try to achieve the desired result. Then you’d have to validate that you’d implemented it properly on the RGS by running tens of millions of simulations, which could take hours on end. AI can take a lot of this pain away. Start with a basic maths model, or even an idea, and AI can do things like achieving a target RTP or volatility, fixing imbalances, running simulations and correcting itself, all in a simple prompt. A simple example from my project – I wanted to change the multipliers at the bottom of the Plinko board from awkward numbers like 1.37x, 1.78x and so on, to round numbers like 1x and 1.5x, without changing the overall RTP of the game. That process might have taken hours with a spreadsheet but was done in 5 minutes with AI. It’s incredibly powerful and it opens the doors to both more complex maths models and for maths to become far more accessible. (NB. In part 2 of the series, I wrote about the silly mistake that AI made when it first built the maths. Because I’m experienced with gambling maths I spotted this problem immediately and it was very easy to both resolve it, and guard against it happening again. But this is a good reason for those who build with AI to ‘stick to what they know’.) - Upgrading dependencies, refactoring code, eliminating tech debt, handling console errors etc. This might surprise people who’ve worked in software development before, but one of the great side-effects of using AI is that you’re forced to regularly refactor and improve your code. This is for a couple of reasons – first because AI’s context window limitations require you to break up the code into smaller, more focused files on a regular basis. But also because AI is improving so frequently, that it often finds ways to improve on what it wrote before. During the project I upgraded both minor and major versions of dependencies, performed code regular code reviews for both security and performance reasons, solved console errors that would otherwise have been too time-consuming, and so on – all with a single prompt. - Testing. I asked AI to build automated tests. Whenever it changed part of the code, it ran these tests, and if it broke something, it just fixed it without any intervention required on my part. Bug fixing was a little more problematic – but bugs that would have taken human engineers many hours were often fixed in a couple of prompts. The trick, as ever, is to describe the bug accurately and with enough context for the AI to be able to figure out the probable cause. - Deployment. AI built the CI/CD pipeline, could automatically commit and sync changes to Github – and both my front and back-end hosts could automatically build and deploy straight from Github. I remember working on a project about 10 years ago that required a CI/CD pipeline to be built from scratch, and we assigned a team of engineers to work on it over a period of months, if not years. I’m convinced that with today’s technology, it could be done in days. ## What Was Hard - Graphics, creativity and the human touch. That’s it. That’s the list. With most of the technology friction now gone, the hardest part of building a casino game today is making it graphically beautiful, well-differentiated and fun to play. All of that requires human creativity (for now). Building a rubbish-looking casino game is easy. I did that with one prompt. Building a casino game that looks great on thousands of different devices, running in different combinations of currencies, languages, and regulated market conditions, is hard and requires good taste, skill and judgement. AI has terrible taste. It builds functional interfaces that are at worst ugly and at best generic, with weird control hierarchies, unnatural use of language, and so on. This will probably change, and in recent weeks we’ve seen things like Google Stitch and ways for AI to integrate with your company’s brand guidelines, that have meaningfully moved the needle. In a year’s time things will probably be different, but to make a casino game look good today, you still need a good group of human graphics designers. AI also can’t build a differentiated product for you, and this is an enormous challenge in casino (both B2B and B2C) which is about to get even worse, thanks to the inevitable wave of AI slop on the way. There are tens of thousands of online casino games. You can copy any one of those games with AI relatively easily. Making yours different so that it stands out in a crowded marketplace is very hard and requires expertise, judgement and taste. Finally, making a game fun is probably the hardest thing of all. Even if your game is beautiful, even if it’s well-differentiated – doesn’t mean it will be fun to play. (And of course, what is fun for one person, may not be fun for another). In the course of building our new game, we encountered this problem on more than one occasion, and it took time and a lot of experimentation to finally arrive at something that we believe will be fun to play. ## A Message to the Skeptics There are many AI skeptics out there and some of them sent me DMs or commented on my posts. At the conclusion of this experiment, to those people I would say a couple of things. - The pace of progress is real. I’ve been ‘vibe-coding’ with AI for over a year now. The frontier AI models today are approximately twice as good (on coding benchmarks) as they were one year ago – the mistakes that Claude 3.5 made just don’t happen anymore with Claude 4.6. Fewer bugs crop up in the first place. Those that do are more easily fixed. The AI gets confused a lot less frequently, can understand more languages, and can work on bigger codebases. Don’t base your opinion of AI on what was possible the last time you checked, unless you checked today. - Don’t criticise AI for things that are also true of human developers. Common criticisms like ‘AI is responsible for security flaws’ or ‘AI writes code with bugs’ are also true of human developers, possibly even more so. I’ve been working with developers for a long time and there have always been security flaws and bugs. And triaging and fixing security issues and bugs with AI is a hell of a lot easier than doing it manually. ## Conclusion Making casino games today is a lot easier than it was even one year ago, thanks to AI. This will have a dramatic impact on casino games development and has the potential to reshape the industry. Not having a plan for AI today is as catastrophic as not having a plan for mobile devices in 2014. If you’re still building everything manually with huge teams of human developers, you might as well be making games in Flash. --- # Can I Vibe Code a Real Online Casino Game (Part 5) URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/03/23/can-i-vibe-code-a-real-online-casino-game-part-5/ Published: 23 March 2026 Previous entries in this series: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4 If you’ve read the previous articles in this series, you’ll know I’ve been vibe coding a ‘real’ online casino game over the past few weeks. But what does ‘real’ mean in this context? I don’t just mean a game that looks real. Vibe coding a front-end that looks and behaves like a casino game is so simple you can do it on a lunch break. You can give your AI screenshots of your favourite slot and it will build a simple front-end that looks and behaves a lot like it. But that’s not how casino games are built in the real world. In the real world, the front-end can’t be trusted, because all its code is public. If all the game logic was held on the front-end, malicious actors could hack the game to change the results, or do myriad other disruptive things. A real game consists of a front-end plus a remote gaming server (RGS), which hosts the Random Number Generator, the game logic, and the maths. The front-end communicates securely with the RGS over an encrypted connection. When the user places a bet, the front-end sends this request to the RGS, and the RGS responds with the outcome of the bet. The RGS, which holds all of the sensitive information, is not directly accessible by the user, and the front-end is only aware of non-sensitive, public information. I’ve built my vibe-coded game this way from the start. The game, which you can play here: https://plinkovibe.scott.co.im is split into a front-end and an RGS. The RGS is hosted in Render and the front-end is hosted in Cloudflare. The two communicate with each other over the public internet using a TLS 1.3 encrypted connection. But it doesn’t stop there. When you run a real online casino game, there are at least four moving parts: The four key parts of launching and playing an online casino game I haven’t yet touched the casino website – the interface where you log in to your player account, make deposits and withdrawals, and choose the game that you want to play. When you launch a game, it’s from the casino website (which will usually launch the game in an iFrame, so you can easily access the cashier, lobby, and other website features). Nor have I touched the Player Account Management system – a back-end system which holds all player accounts and their details – such as personal information, deposit and withdrawal methods, account balances etc. The PAM is a critical part of the casino infrastructure. For this exercise I am interested in building the game in a realistic way, so I want to move the player account out of the RGS and into its own back-end service. Then I will build a log-in feature and add a simple cashier with currency support to the front-end, to simulate the casino website. ## Underwhelming In real life, there are companies who charge a lot of money for a PAM. To be fair, they are much more complex than the one I’m building, which is little more than a simulation. Real PAMs need to be very, very secure, as they are holding personally identifiable information, monetary transactions, and more. My PAM is built with a single prompt. No, really. I ask Cursor to plan its implementation of the PAM split, using Claude Opus 4.6. Then I use Sonnet 4.6 to build it… and it one shots the whole thing – the PAM itself, stripping the user account out of the RGS, secure communication between the two back-end components, even the front-end components for user account creation and cashier operations (simulating the casino website). It takes me significantly longer to configure and deploy the new app structure than it does to actually build it, and that’s only because I make a human error when configuring the shared secret in the environment variables (needed for the two back-end components to communicate securely with each other). Weirdly, this is one of the most underwhelming things I’ve encountered since starting the project. I find it satisfying when I have to get involved to solve problems or spot improvements. But on this occasion, all I can do is tweak the UI. (It’s still a little unpolished at the time of writing). ## A New Development Working on this project so far has been an eye-opening experience. The next and last post will wrap up what I’ve learned, and what I think it means for the casino industry and the people who work in it. Why am I wrapping up the project at this point? Because going through the process has convinced me that yes, it really is possible to vibe code a casino game. So, with the help of two old friends, I’m going to try to do exactly that! It won’t be PlinkoVibe, the game you’ve seen so far. Rather than build something for academic purposes, we’re going to build the most fun game we possibly can, and attempt to launch it with one of the industry giants. That means I’ll be taking the project private for a while. We might not succeed in getting a game live, and if we do, it might not make any money. But if we are genuinely able to achieve it, it will be quite the achievement for just the three of us and our trusty friend Claude. --- # Can I Vibe Code a Real Online Casino Game (Part 4) URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/03/18/can-i-vibe-code-a-real-online-casino-game-part-4/ Published: 18 March 2026 Previous entries in this series: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 In last week’s article, I wrote about how I spent many, many frustrating hours working on improving the graphics and animation of my vibe-coded casino game, PlinkoVibe. Eventually, I got to a point where it was difficult to improve without getting real graphics designers involved, people with genuine expertise, so I decided to move on and work on some more fun parts of the experiment. ## Background Music Last week I concluded that the people who work on the graphics, animations and visuals for online casino games add a lot more value than I first thought. But another part of what makes a casino game feel good to play is the sound effects and background music. So far, PlinkoVibe has been silent besides the tinkling of the balls as they fall down the board into the slots beneath. To be truly professional, my game needs a soundtrack. AI has already disrupted music far more than you might think. Streaming services have a surprising amount of AI-generated content already – my kids often listen to songs that I am almost certain are AI-generated. I say almost certain, because it’s genuinely hard to tell. To create my background music, I use Suno. Suno is the leading AI music creation model and it is really very impressive the first time you use it. Describe the song you want, and Suno produces two versions of a full song which you can download for free (but cannot use commercially without upgrading to a paid subscription). To create the song I use AI to prompt AI. I feed Perplexity all the articles I’ve written so far and some of the assets I’ve produced, and ask it to create a prompt for Suno to create background music for the game. Then I enter this into Suno and the results are pretty great. My background music, ‘Lucky Loop Lanes’, is a certified banger. Actually, one of the songs is too much of a banger. This is background music, after all, I don’t want it to be distracting. I pick the version that is a little more chilled out, and ask Cursor to implement it as background music in the game, at a low volume relative to the sound effects and with a volume control for those who want to dial it up or down to their taste. There’s one final challenge. Modern browsers prevent websites from automatically playing audio unless the user interacts with the page, so my background music doesn’t start until the player clicks somewhere. To solve this, I implement a splash screen with a brief overview of the rules, which I need to do anyway. When the user clicks on the call-to-action, the music starts. At the time I write this, I’ve been humming the background music around the house for days. ## Deploying to Live So far, everything has run locally on my machine. But this exercise is supposed to be somewhat realistic, and in a real online casino environment, things are much more complicated: - The casino has a website which launches the game, usually in an iFrame or canvas - The player account (most importantly their account balance) is held on a casino system called the PAM (Player Account Management system), which is usually not hosted on the same infrastructure as the website. The casino game itself is split into two: - a backend – the Remote Gaming Server, which handles all of the game logic and is not accessible to the public at all - the frontend, which by its very nature, is entirely accessible to the public – and therefore, cannot contain anything sensitive at all So there are four components, all potentially hosted on different infrastructure, which need to talk to each other securely and with high performance. I’ve built my app with this in mind from the very beginning, but to keep things simple, so far I have only split the app into two parts – a frontend and backend. I’ll do the PAM later. Choosing where to deploy the frontend is easy – I pick Cloudflare. It’s free, incredibly performant, and I already have it setup on my website for DDOS protection and CDN. I’m a huge Cloudflare fan and setting up the project in Cloudflare Pages is ridiculously easy. To be honest, I would have used Cloudflare for the backend as well, but for realism I want to deploy elsewhere, so choose Render. There is, unfortunately, a downside to this. On their free plan, Render puts your service in a ‘sleep mode’ if it’s inactive for 15 minutes or more, and it can take up to a minute to start up again. Obviously, this would be a huge issue for a real project, but for my personal experiment, I just make sure the frontend can gracefully handle this slow startup. I implement a ‘connecting’ screen that explains the situation and even has a link to donate money to buy better servers! Before going live for the first time, I ask Opus 4.6 to run a thorough security audit, and then implement them with Sonnet. It implements some useful security hardening which would be important in the real world, such as rate limiting, a CORS policy, XSS prevention, enforcing TLS 1.3 at a minimum, and more. I also explore a couple of other hardening options. I can’t stop the player being able to read the API calls, for example – even interfere with them potentially, since they have access to the local machine. I make sure the server doesn’t accept invalid requests, for safety. It’s already designed so that nothing the player does on the frontend can change the outcome on the backend, but I validate this anyway, just to be safe. I could also obfuscate everything on the frontend. But I stop short of doing this just yet – it should really be the final step in any deployment, as it will make maintaining the app very difficult. The game breaks immediately in two important ways. First, any bet with multiple balls plays out with a huge delay between each ball drops. The first ball drops. You wait an age. The second ball drops… it’s unplayable. Secondly, any time you play more than 30 balls at once, the RGS immediately disconnects and the whole game fails. My first instinct is that instead of sending the bet as a single request that includes the number of balls, the front-end is sending a single request for each ball. I inspect the API calls and my suspicions are confirmed – each bet is a single API request, and when your bet is for 30 balls or more, 30 or more requests are sent immediately after one another and the rate limit that I just added for security is exceeded. Fixing this is easy, thankfully. Cursor quickly rebuilds the bet request to include the number of balls, and increases the rate limit a little for good measure. The problem is resolved. Now, everything is live! You can play the game here: https://plinkovibe.scott.co.im Try your best to break it and let me know your experience. ## What Next I’m getting close to my objective now. The next step to make this more realistic is to split the infrastructure into three parts – PAM, RGS and frontend. I don’t actually need a real PAM to get to the end goal (a casino game that could plausibly be deployed live with a real casino operator), I just need to be able to simulate one so that the way my RGS interacts with a PAM is realistic. I’ll need a simple player account, a way to manage the balance, and support for some popular currencies. Based on my experience so far I don’t think this will be very difficult to implement, but there might be some issues that crop up when I deploy the thing on three different servers. The hard part will be making PlinkoVibe a game that players would actually want to play. There are probably a hundred Plinko games on the market right now, why would players choose mine? I have some ideas on that though, and an old friend does as well. More on that in the next article! ## Want to Contribute? If you want to contribute or help me work through issues, clone the repo and get in touch! https://github.com/AlexScott72o/PlinkoVibe If you’d like to help me buy the Render premium plan, go here: https://buymeacoffee.com/alexscott Of course if you just want to play the game and send me your feedback, go here: https://plinkovibe.scott.co.im (you might have to wait patiently for the game to start up from sleep). --- # Can I Vibe Code a Real Casino Game (Part 3) URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/03/11/can-i-vibe-code-a-real-casino-game-part-3/ Published: 11 March 2026 Previous entries in this series: Part 1 · Part 2 If you’ve read the previous parts of this series, you’ll know that I was able to one-shot a simple but complete, working casino game and remote gaming server by vibe coding (using natural language to create apps using AI, instead of writing code yourself). The first version had… issues. Part 2 of the series explains how the first version, besides looking awful, had a huge flaw whereby the game was almost always profitable for the player – the AI simply hadn’t taken into account that this game needed to have a house edge, and some of the game configurations had an RTP of over 400%. That issue proved to be pretty easy to fix. This week, however, I’ve been back and forth on the UI and UX, and it has been by far the most frustrating experience I’ve had so far. To recap, here’s what the one-shot version looked like: Ugly, but players would have loved it Once I’d fixed the RTP (see the last article) I decided to make it a priority to improve the UI/UX. My to-do list includes many other items, including making this experiment more realistic by splitting the RGS into an RGS and a separate Player Account Management (PAM) system, but there’s only so much ugliness I can stand. The state-of-the-art model for UI/UX is Gemini 3.1 Pro at the time of writing, so I explicitly choose this model in Cursor and ask it to overhaul the UI and make it beautiful. This is what I get: First Gemini 3.1 update No doubt it’s an improvement, especially the stats and game control panels, but it’s very generic and there are still issues to be resolved. Making it ‘beautiful’ is a very subjective thing, and making it beautiful AND distinctive would be harder still. Doing so is beyond my skillset, but thinking through this process makes me appreciate my former graphic designer colleagues even more. My list of improvements is easily 50+ items long. I take them one at a time. After about 15 minutes I have this: Gemini 3.1 Pro with some minor improvements A few more visual tweaks, and an improved paytable later, I have this: Gemini 3.1 Pro with about 30 minutes of tweaking and improvements I share this on LinkedIn, and to my amazement more, than one person copies the game. Both take the screenshot alone, feed it into Claude Code, and replicate the front end (albeit without the RGS components) easily. They each take the game in a slightly different direction, and both add the ability to drop multiple balls (which is a popular feature that is on my to-do list). Before I get to that, however, my biggest problem is the animation. I decide to fix that before I add the ability to drop multiple balls. ## The Hardest Part So Far At this stage, the ball animation is problematic in a number of ways: - The ball itself is just a blue circle - It moves in straight lines - The ‘ball’ frequently overlaps the pegs of the plinko board, passing over them instead of around them I want the ball to bounce naturally off the pegs and eventually land in the slot that the server determined. What follows next gives me a sincere appreciation of the complexity of animation in online games, and how many things can go wrong! The crucial challenge is this: because this is supposed to be a realistic online casino game, the outcome is decided by the server and not the front-end. The front-end needs to receive the outcome and then draw an animation whereby the ball lands in the correct slot. It’s a critical issue if the ball lands in the wrong place, as then the visuals will not match the result of the bet determined on the server. If I could just randomly determine the outcome on the client side, this would all be so much easier. But I can’t. With every change I ask for, I seem to introduce a new issue. For example, in troubleshooting the ball moving in straight lines and overlapping the pegs, I somehow make the ball entirely invisible. Getting the ball to move in a realistic fashion proves very difficult. I ask Cursor to try three completely different approaches and allow me to choose between them with a feature flag. One of the options it creates is perfect – it uses a framework known as Matter.js to simulate real ball physics. I can adjust how heavy the ball is, how much it bounces off the pegs, and more. It makes the ball drop look very realistic. But with real physics, the ball lands in the wrong slot almost every time. After hours of experimentation, I arrive at the solution – ‘not-quite-real-physics’. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a biased ball. Every time the ball bounces off a peg, the physics engine ‘nudges’ the ball slightly in the direction of the chosen outcome. Each nudge is very small, so the movement still looks natural. After a series of these nudges, however, the ball is guaranteed to land in the right place. Success! Except no, I’ve introduced a hundred regressions. The ball sometimes bounces out of bounds, for example. I spend ages fixing this, and a bug where the ball continues to fall below the slots at the bottom of the board. Along the way, I introduce automated tests, whereby Cursor’s agent checks that the ball is still landing in the right place every time it makes a change. These tests fail. A lot. The agent goes round in circles (thankfully without needing my intervention) until it resolves the issue. Eventually, it’s done. The ball lands where it should, every time. The ball movement looks realistic. Time to add support for multiple balls. ## Too Many Balls! I ask Cursor to add support for multiple balls, up to a hundred at a time. Betting on multiple balls is a really satisfying way to play Plinko – your bet is multiplied by the number of balls dropped, and they fall one after another with a short delay between each. Everything breaks. It’s a catastrophe. To be honest, I’d sort of expected this. The realistic physics model is somewhat intensive and requires a bit of computer power, and now I’ve multiplied it by 100. As I mentioned earlier in the series, one of the challenges in vibe coding is that you often create code that, because you haven’t written it, you don’t understand. So at this point, I have to ask Cursor to explain the code it has written and how it works, so I can think about how to optimise it (and so I can guide the AI in the right direction as well). What the code is doing is: - Creating a ball - Receiving the outcome from the RGS - Calculating a path for that ball to follow, which results in the ball landing in the correct slot - Animating that path so that the user sees the ball falling, colliding with the pegs on the board, and landing in the right place My gut feel is that the performance issue comes when the calculation happens, but I ask Cursor to implement FPS logging in the console to confirm this. Indeed, the logging confirms that FPS drops (from 120 to about 3) roughly when a new ball is created. Once all the balls are on screen, the performance of the animation dramatically improves. I resolve the main performance issue by having the client calculate the path for all balls before the animation begins. This means there is a slight delay before any balls start dropping, but it’s barely noticeable, and the animation itself is far smoother. I ask Cursor to look for other optimisations as well, and it implements multi-threading of certain animation elements, so that they don’t block each other. This is noticeable when testing on mobile, for example. Finally, I have something that seems to work. But if you watch the video below and you’re quite observant, you’ll see that there are still a couple of issues remaining! Getting the balls to land in the right slot is proving to be incredibly tricky. Watch on LinkedIn: dropping 100 balls after many optimisations, but still with some tricky bugs remaining After fixing that problem, it’s time to check everything works on mobile. You could certainly argue I’ve done this the wrong way round, and I should have started with mobile and built desktop later. More than 80% of casino user acquisition (for a typical operator) comes from mobile devices, and it can be higher still in emerging markets where many players simply don’t own a desktop device. But for many casino operators, the big money still comes from desktop devices. In any case, implementing basic mobile support isn’t that difficult. The first version has enormous betting controls that require the user to scroll down to see the game itself. But all I need to do is ask Cursor specifically to create a mobile layout, and put the non-essential controls behind a settings menu. And here’s what I get: First attempt at a mobile version At this point, I’m ready to spend time on something else. I could spend forever improving these visuals, but with just me and Cursor, it’s diminishing returns now. This whole process has given me an enormous appreciation for how tricky it can be to get the graphics, visuals and animations right in a casino game. In my earlier articles, I spoke about how I liked Hacksaw games, in part because of how smooth and performant their graphics and animations are compared to much of the competition. Researching further, I learn that Hacksaw has built their own proprietary game engine, which makes enormous sense to me now. I also realise that this proprietary IP is more valuable, and difficult to replicate than I first realised. ## What Next? I have a number of things on my to-do list at this point: - Deploying a ‘production’ version of the game that you actually play - Simpler volatility controls - Background music and better sound effects - Compliance features for a simple regulated market - Implementing some of the feedback I’ve received on my posts, for example preventing the user from tampering with the game with browser tools, etc. - Security measures like code obfuscation - Support for real currencies - Splitting the RGS into a separate RGS and PAM - Better differentiating the game from the Plinko competition, so it might have a chance at being commercially successful What do you think I should do next? Let me know in the comments. ## Want to Contribute? If you want to contribute or help me work through issues, clone the repo and get in touch! https://github.com/AlexScott72o/PlinkoVibe --- # Can I Vibe Code a Real Online Casino Game? (Part 2) URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/03/02/can-i-vibe-code-a-real-online-casino-game-part-2/ Published: 2 March 2026 Previous entry in this series: Part 1 Just thirteen minutes later, I have thousands of lines of code. I configure the dev environment and… it runs. Have I just one-shotted a real casino game? In less time than the typical daily stand-up call? I supposed I shouldn’t be too surprised that the answer is yes. In the context of vibe-coding, my project is far from the most ambitious. Last year Pieter ‘levelsio’ Mouthaan vibe-coded an entire browser-based flight simulator, with multiplayer, using only Cursor. In comparison to that Plinko feels… simple. But still, thousands of you clicked through to my last article on this, so I can’t be the only person who finds doing this in the casino context to be interesting. As expected, it looks like garbage: One-shotting Plinko... with some interesting results In this first version, there’s no ball animation at all, no sound effects and the entire user experience when the play button is clicked is that the outcome is briefly displayed and your balance goes up or down (mostly up, more on that in a minute!). It turns out that Cursor hasn’t actually generated any nice imagery like I asked, it just created a script so that I could do that later. I reiterate that it should go ahead and create the graphics and sounds properly, which it quickly does. But it still looks really bad. Also, why is the game called ‘Plinko Go!’? I never asked for it to be called that, and I quickly change the name to ‘PlinkoVibe’ because it turns out that Plinko Go is a game owned by 1x2 Network and I don’t like being sued. Hang on… while fixing this I notice another problem. Why is the middle slot on the Plinko board 1x? Wouldn’t that mean that.... yep. Cursor has built the game in such a way that the player is guaranteed to win. This is a casino game with no house edge. ## The World’s Most Popular Plinko Game? To be fair, I’ve been working with AI long enough now that I know not to trust its output without carefully verifying the important parts, and I’d intended to verify the maths model anyway. My experience with gambling maths goes back more than twenty years, to my early days as a poker player. The principles are the same regardless what gambling vertical you’re dealing with – and in a casino game, it’s as simple as ensuring that every bet made by the player has an expected value (EV) of less than the bet amount, i.e. that every bet has a house edge. You can choose to complicate things – for example, by having zero or positive EV bets available, but only after the player has made a negative EV bet (such as the zero EV odds bet in craps made after betting the pass line, or certain +EV bonus or free spin rounds in slots). But Plinko is as simple as it gets, and so I just knock up a quick Google Sheet. It shows that several of the configs are bad, not only the obvious one. In the worst case, the user can select the 10-line, high-volatility config, and win $4.03 on average for every $1 that they bet. Some configs also have the opposite problem – an RTP that is too low, which would make some players very unhappy indeed. Before I fix these problems manually, I’m curious if AI can find and fix this problem by itself. I ask Cursor: Carefully check the maths model for this game in the config files. Are you sure this would be safe for an online casino to offer? Cursor immediately recognises the problems – that RTP is too high in several of the configs, and too low in two of them as well. It rebuilds the maths models of the incorrect configs, aiming for an RTP of 96–97%. Impressively, it also does something great that I didn’t think about, and didn’t ask for. It builds RTP validation into the game configuration on the RGS. On server startup, the RTP of each and every config is validated to ensure that it’s between 90–100%. If this validation fails, the server throws an error and doesn’t start up. This is a nice touch, and prevents people from accidentally breaking the configuration in a serious way. It’s probably not resilient enough for production, but is very helpful nonetheless. To be safe, I check the new configurations in the same manual fashion, using my Google Sheet. They are valid, if not particularly pretty. There are multipliers like 1.54 and 22.7 that I know from experience players are not going to like much. Players are biased towards round numbers that result in understandable outcomes. We’ll have to fix this later. ## Understanding the Code and the RNG One of the issues with vibe-coding is that you often generate code that you simply don’t understand. That’s definitely the case for me – although I wrote code throughout my childhood and studied programming at university, I haven’t written much code since. I’ve mostly managed people who did. Vibe coding has given people like me the ability to create projects without needing developers at all, at least to a point, and that’s a real game-changer. But I do want to understand how the code works, and TypeScript is pretty easy to read, which is one of the reasons it’s popular. I read the docs and some of the code, to get a sense of what’s going on. I decide that the next thing I should investigate, before I go to the bother of making the game look good, is the Random Number Generator. The RNG is a critically important part of any online casino game and it’s very easy to get things wrong. It’s also easy to overthink it. The two important things are that: - The RNG must produce an outcome that is truly random - The RNG must produce an outcome that cannot be predicted or manipulated by an outsider These two things are naturally linked – the number isn’t random if it can be predicted or manipulated. Some of the earliest attacks on online casino games came because the vendor thought they were generating random numbers but they were actually predictable – typically because they used a non-random number (like the current time) in the RNG algorithm. There’s a lot of talk online about ‘true’ randomness and some companies go to great lengths to introduce entropy into systems. (Such as Cloudflare, which has a wall of Lava Lamps with cameras pointed at them to generate entropy). But the truth is, the most sophisticated hardware RNG doesn’t provide practical real-life benefits over a good pseudo-random system, not when it comes to gambling at least. Either a number is random or it isn’t; there’s no such thing as ‘one number being more random than another’. There is another important factor here, which is that once you have the number provided by the RNG, you need to turn that into an outcome in your game. It’s really important not to introduce a source of predictability in this process, or it won’t matter if your RNG is random or not. So I need to verify the RNG itself, as well as the way this random number if turned into an outcome. I ask Cursor to explain it to me, and follow along with the code. In short: - It gets 4 random bytes from the operating system using Node’s crypto.randomBytes method. I sense check this approach with third-party sources. It’s part of OpenSSL and widely considered to be considered ‘good enough’ for cryptography, so it’s good enough here as well. - These 4 random bytes represent a number in the range of zero to 4,294,967,295. - To get a probability in the range of 0 to 1, the algorithm simply scales down by dividing by 4,294,967,295. - This result is then used to directly select one of the possible outcomes. This approach seems fine, and as I said, it’s easy to overthink these things. But crucially, there’s nothing the user can do to predetermine, or affect the result of the RNG or the way that number is converted into an outcome. Can I check this further? I could probably run out a bunch of outcomes, say 1 million, but I’d likely burn through way too many tokens doing so. I’ll leave that to the certification people! ## What Do I Have Now? Well, I’ve got a Plinko game that connects to a Remote Gaming Server. I’m happy with the maths model and I’m happy with the RNG, so the core fundamentals of the game are in reasonable shape now. It still looks incredibly ugly, so there’s a lot of work still to be done… In the meantime, I’m opening up the project’s GitHub: https://github.com/AlexScott72o/PlinkoVibe Feel free to poke around, make comments, clone or branch the project as you see fit! More to come soon. --- # Can I Vibe Code a Real Online Casino Game? URL: https://scott.co.im/2026/02/26/can-i-vibe-code-a-real-online-casino-game/ Published: 26 February 2026 I’ve worked in gaming for twenty years now, and in the past 18 months or so I’ve been working with AI a great deal, both to become more productive in my day-to-day work, and to build simple side projects and apps. Vibe coding (building apps using natural language, without writing code yourself) builds on a skillset I already have – earlier in my career I was a Head of Product at Microgaming, and before that at Full Tilt. In short, being good at vibe coding is similar to being a good Product Manager. So naturally I wondered if I could combine the two things. Could I vibe code a real, working casino game? If I could, what would be the implications for this very, very profitable industry? ## Background Casino games are both wonderfully simple and deceptively complex. On the one hand, slot games are so simple to make that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of game studios doing it, and tens of thousands of people employed in the business. There are very few unprofitable game studios, and new ones are popping up all the time. Barriers to entry, at least in the unregulated markets, are low. On the other hand, nothing is as simple as it first looks. The back-end and front-end of a casino game are completely different systems that are both interdependent and fundamentally isolated. Things like random number generation, determination of outcomes, the fundamental mathematics of the game, and transactions between the user’s casino wallet and the wagers and outcomes in the game absolutely cannot happen in the front-end, or it would be a massive security hole. The front-end needs to be graphically beautiful, incredibly fast, and work on an astonishingly wide range of devices and browsers – both mobile and desktop. It needs to handle complex edge cases – how do you gracefully recover if the user is disconnected after they’ve placed a bet, but before the result is presented? There are more complexities. Currencies. Languages. Integrations with operators. This doesn’t even begin to cover the commercial side of casino games – which games will make money. Today’s slot studios know that, just because you’ve released a game, doesn’t mean that operators will publish or promote it. Similarly, just because your game is published doesn’t mean you’ll make a return on your investment, especially in the short term. Different markets like different types of games. Emerging markets and brand-new players like simple content. Long-established markets like the US and Canada tend to favour old-fashioned, low-volatility stuff. Asia likes table games and live dealer. Some players even care about RTP. These are massive generalisations – there are endless nuances and pitfalls, and I’m just scratching the surface. ## The Goal Despite this, I’m not put off. Perhaps this is because I’ve worked extensively with peer-to-peer games, which have all of the above complexities and many more to boot. More importantly I’d figured I’d learn a lot from trying. It’s a step up from the simple apps I have been building myself, and a way for me to get down and dirty with casino content in a way that I haven’t before. That said, I know that the best way to vibe code is to start simple and iterate from there. I’m not trying to build the next blockbuster title here. After considering even simpler ideas like Hi/Lo and Rock Paper Scissors, my soft spot for Plinko wins out. Plinko is easy to understand but also fun, even relaxing, to play. To succeed, it needs clean animations and an easy-to-understand front-end. Then there is the back-end to think about, and all the interactions between the two. Ideally, I want to get to a final product that could feasibly work in a real casino, but… ## What I’m Expecting The truth is I’m expecting to get about 80% of the way there and then struggle with the last mile. Real casino games need to be certified, and that costs way more money than this experiment will justify (and who knows if my game will even pass?) Beyond that, there are regulated markets to think about, and their myriad requirements. Also, while I have tons of experience in UI/UX, I don’t have any graphical or sound skills. Graphic design, animation, and sound effects are a huge part of what make casino games fun to play. If a slot studio lost its designers, the feel of their games would change immediately. Since I don’t have these skills, I’ll be relying on AI to generate everything and in my experience, it is not always good at this. I’m expecting my game to look… basic. There is also the possibility that what I end up with will look like a casino game, feel like a casino game – but be broken in some fundamental way that makes it useless. Maybe it won’t pay out correctly, the RNG won’t work, or something else. I once read that when you ask an LLM a question, what you are actually asking is ‘What would a good answer to this question look like?’. So I could very well end up with something that is a passable impression of a casino game, but utterly unplayable in practice. People get paid a lot of money to build casino games. Do I really trust an LLM to do it? ## Day 1 – Building in Public I decided to build in public, so that you can follow along with my progress and maybe give advice if you’re feeling generous. I’ll share the Github for this project soon, for those interested. I know from experience that planning ahead makes a big difference in Vibe Coding, just as it does in Product Management. So I start by making a plan. First, I use Perplexity to research Plinko games and remote gaming servers. I feed it examples of Plinko games I particularly like (my favourite is Hacksaw’s Dare2Win series, but there are lots of good versions which ironically are sometimes called ‘Originals’ despite being anything but original). I also include publicly-available material from Stake Engine, Tequity, and others, and ask it to produce a summary report that I can feed into other AI tools. I’ll be using Cursor to build – I’ve been using it for over a year and it has developed at an extraordinarily fast pace in that time. I consider Claude Code as well, but that would require yet another subscription, and I do enjoy a GUI. I feed as much context as possible into Cursor, including the documentation generated by Perplexity and screenshots of popular Plinko games, and tell it what I’m trying to do. I use Perplexity to iterate on the prompt and, while doing so, realise that I’m essentially building a simple RGS as well as a casino game. Oh well. I ask my old friend Philip Atkinson, who has been building a web-based game for some time, if he would recommend any technologies to use. He suggests TypeScript as the primary language for various reasons, which I am somewhat familiar with and can understand reasonably well. Perplexity likes his suggestion. Then I ask Cursor to use Opus 4.6 to make a plan. If you’re interested, here’s the prompt: You are an expert full-stack game engineer and UX designer building a browser-based Plinko casino game with a simple Remote Gaming Server (RGS) backend. Goals and constraints: - The game must run in current versions of all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) on both desktop and mobile. - It must support both portrait and landscape orientations gracefully. - The user experience must feel like a modern, polished casino game: smooth animations, responsive layout, and satisfying sound design. - The game must run end-to-end on my local machine and be playable from iOS devices on the same local network. Technology: - Use a modern, widely supported stack. Preferred: React + TypeScript for the front-end and Node.js + Express for the backend. If you have a strong reason to pick a similar alternative (e.g., Vite, Next.js), explain briefly and then implement. - Implement the backend as a simple RGS-like service that: - Hosts the Plinko math and RNG. - Manages player sessions and balances. - Exposes REST endpoints for: creating a session, getting config, placing a Plinko bet, querying balance and recent history. - Use a very small persistence layer (e.g., in-memory store plus JSON file, or SQLite) to keep balances and recent history between restarts. Game design (Plinko): - Implement a Plinko board with configurable number of rows (e.g., 8–16) and risk levels (Low, Medium, High). - Each configuration (rows + risk) should map to a specific paytable and probability distribution, defined on the server. - Use a math model where the server: - Chooses the outcome slot index based on the configured probabilities. - Looks up the multiplier from the paytable. - Calculates the win = bet * multiplier. - Updates and returns the new balance plus the outcome details. - Implement at least one RTP variant initially (e.g., ~96–97%) but structure the code so that additional RTP variants (e.g., 98.98%, 94.3%, etc.) can be added as separate configurations. - For now, use a designer-controlled probability distribution for each slot rather than a strict physical simulation, but keep the distribution shape roughly binomial-like (more hits in the middle, rare at the edges). Front-end behavior: - The front-end should never compute outcomes. It only: - Lets the player set bet size, choose rows and risk level, and optionally enable autoplay. - Calls the backend API to place a bet. - Receives the outcome (slot index, multiplier, win amount, updated balance). - Animates a ball dropping down the board into the final slot that matches the server’s outcome. - Implement responsive design for both portrait and landscape modes on desktop and mobile. - Use high-quality visuals and animations: - Use CSS transforms and requestAnimationFrame-based animations (or a small animation library if needed). - Make the ball movement feel physical and satisfying, even though the outcome is pre-determined. - Implement basic sound effects for: - Ball bouncing on pegs. - Final landing. - Wins, scaled by win magnitude. Asset generation via AI: - Use the latest Google Gemini model (via the appropriate API) to assist with visual design: - Generate a cohesive visual style (color palette, background art, peg and ball styles, UI elements such as buttons and panels). - Generate raster or vector assets where appropriate and integrate them into the build (e.g., exporting to a local assets/ folder). - Optionally help draft sound design descriptions that can be turned into sound effects (or simple generated audio files if feasible within the stack). - Clearly separate the asset-generation step from the main game logic so assets can be refreshed or swapped later. Backend API details: - Implement the following endpoints: - POST /api/session → create or restore a session and return sessionId and balance. - GET /api/config?sessionId=... → return current paytable, allowed rows, risk levels, and default settings. - POST /api/plinko/bet → body includes sessionId, betAmount, selected rows, and risk level. - GET /api/balance?sessionId=... → return current balance. - GET /api/history?sessionId=... → return last N rounds (for debugging/analytics in dev). - Log each round on the server (bet, outcome, multiplier, win, resulting balance) so that RTP can be inspected over many rounds during development. Networking and local play: - Configure the backend to listen on 0.0.0.0 so that it is reachable from other devices on the local network. - Configure the frontend to either proxy API requests in development or to call the backend via a configurable BASE_URL environment variable. - Document how to run the project: - npm install / npm run dev (or equivalent) commands. - How to obtain and configure Google Gemini API credentials. - How to access the game from an iOS device using the machine’s LAN IP. Code quality and structure: - Organize the project with clear separation between front-end and back-end folders. - Use TypeScript types for API requests/responses and shared game models where possible. - Include comments where helpful, but prioritize clean, self-explanatory code - Provide a short README explaining architecture, how the math model works, and where to adjust paytables and RTP. Start by scaffolding the full-stack project (front-end + back-end + shared types), then implement the backend math and API, then the front-end UI and animations, and finally the asset-generation integration with Google Gemini. Further context is attached. I review the plan and, in my opinion, it doesn’t emphasise security nearly enough. I expand it, making it absolutely clear that all game logic resides in the RGS and must be completely isolated from the front-end. I emphasise that the user should never be able to affect the outcome or figure it out in advance, and so on. I add this to the plan and click ‘Build’. Just thirteen minutes later, I have thousands of lines of code. I configure the dev environment and… it runs. Have I just one-shotted a real casino game? In less time than the typical daily stand-up call? (Find out in my next article!) If you’re building in this space and you think I could learn from your expertise, I’d love to chat! Send me a DM, and lets connect! --- # Does Your Password Look L1k3Th15? Five signs your IT setup might need some TLC URL: https://scott.co.im/2021/10/18/does-your-password-look-l1k3th15/ Published: 18 October 2021 Alex Scott, CTO at ParagonEX and Chair of the Digital Forum at Isle of Man Chamber of Commerce We all know that cybersecurity is important, but how do you know if the security measures you have in place are doing their job? Here are five signs that your IT setup needs some love and attention. ## 1. Your Password Looks L1k3Th15 We’re often told that passwords should contain special characters, numbers and both lower and uppercase letters. While this does have an impact on the security of the password, in practice it’s of little importance. Take an 8-character password for example. If it’s numbers only – like 12345678 – a bog-standard computer can crack it instantly. If it uses numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and special characters, it takes longer to crack – about 8 hours. In other words, a complex 8-character password, on its own, is still useless against a security threat. The point is, with a mind-boggling password, you might feel safer, but in reality you’re not. In the IT business we call this ‘security theatre’, which is the act of making people feel like they are safe without actually making them safer. Often, this security theatre has real costs. For example, you’re much more likely to forget a complex password, and so you and your IT team wastes time with a lot of password resets. So what makes a password really secure? The answer is simple – length. A nine-character password is exponentially harder to crack than an eight-character password. A ten character password is exponentially harder than a nine-character password. And so on. The longer you can make your password, the more secure it is. A great way to create long passwords that you can remember is to create a passphrase – a series of three or more words. For example, the password Chewie-Banana-Odyssey (three words that, ahem, randomly occurred to me just now) is easy to remember, but would take a computer over a hundred quintillion years to crack by brute force. Even better, you can use a password manager to create and store lengthy, unique passwords for every service that you use. Password managers are now built into Apple and Android devices and will even notify you if your password has been involved in a security breach in the past. ## 2. You change your password every 30 days This is another great example of security theatre, which makes your life inconvenient without providing any real protection. No argument for changing passwords on a regular basis stands up to scrutiny. The main reason is that if somebody has cracked your password, and so you change it – they can simply crack your password again! The act of changing the password on a regular basis inconveniences you more than the hacker, and costs your company more in wasted time and resources. What would actually make a difference? Well – what if instead of needing only a password to access your account, you also needed something like your mobile phone? We call this two-factor authentication, and it is the best way to secure your account against hacking. The idea being – somebody could crack your password (something you know), but unless they also steal your phone (something you have), they can’t access your account. Most websites and all workplace IT environments support two-factor authentication. Not using it is like leaving your doors unlocked – it’s a matter of when, not if, something bad happens. Find out how to enable two-factor authentication on your favourite sites and services here. ## 3. You’re still using Windows 10 No, really! Windows 11 has been released for days now, what are you waiting for? Well OK, Windows 11 is brand new at the time of writing, so you’d be forgiven if you hadn’t rolled it out to everybody yet. But you should have a plan. Keeping your systems up to date is one of the most important ways to protect against cyber threats. The majority of ransomware attacks that exist, for example, rely on users having outdated devices. The infamous WannaCry ransomware attack, which caused billions of dollars worth of damage to organisations including the UK National Health Service, only affected machines which were a year or more behind on their updates. In the olden days, IT teams used to delay updating machines to ensure that nothing went wrong, no compatibility issues were introduced, and so on. Nowadays, security professionals overwhelmingly agree that the benefits of updating quickly vastly outweigh the risks. Get it done, and don’t forget your personal devices either. Update all the things! ## 4. Nobody has ever tried to hack you before Yes, they have. No, really, they have. You just don’t know about it. I have a personal website. It’s nothing special, just a few blogs and videos. Nonetheless, somebody tries to hack it every day. I know this because I have a firewall that fends them off, and tells me about it. It tells me what they are trying to do, so I can improve my defences. If somebody tries to hack my personal website every day, you can guarantee that your business is being attacked every day. If you didn’t know that, it’s probably because you don’t have monitoring in place to tell you. Pretty much everybody has antivirus and firewalls protecting them, but monitoring takes that to the next level – watching what is happening, and informing you when something is out of the ordinary, so you can do something about it. Monitoring can tell you if one of your employees’ passwords has been breached, if somebody is trying to attack your corporate website, or if an employee is looking at personal information that they shouldn’t have access to. Monitoring is easily added to your corporate setup and if you don’t have it, you should get help. Still don’t believe that somebody has tried to hack you? Go to Spycloud or Have I Been Pwned and find out for yourself! ## 5. Frogs sit on logs Anybody with young children knows that cats sit on mats and frogs sit on logs, and that those are the rules. But if that’s where your knowledge of logs ends, then you need to talk to your IT team. Imagine a situation where you have suffered a cyber attack. There are a million things to do, but a top priority is to find out how the attack happened, so that you can prevent it from happening again. Logs enable you to do that, by keeping a record of every little thing that happens on your devices and networks. If you don’t have the logs, you won’t have a record of how the attacker gained access to your systems, and what they did when they had access. Somebody or something should be reviewing the logs on a regular basis for signs of suspicious activity. Don’t forget to keep backups of your logs. A clever attacker will delete the logs to cover their tracks, enabling them to come back and repeat the attack at a later date. They might also attack your backups, so be sure to store them in a way which is completely disconnected (‘air gapped’) from the rest of your infrastructure. ## What Now? If any of these five things resonate for you, don’t worry. It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and on the 19th October the Villa Marina will play host to CyberIsle, a world-class cyber security conference. Come along to the conference for loads of practical advice for businesses small and large. Alternatively, reach out to us at the Chamber of Commerce – any of the members of our Digital Forum can signpost you to the help and support you need. Interested in cyber security and all things digital? Chamber of Commerce’s Digital Forum is looking for new members. Visit https://www.iomchamber.org.im/about-iomcoc/committees-forums/digital/ to find out more. --- # Chamber of Commerce Digital Forum – 2021 Annual Review URL: https://scott.co.im/2021/10/15/chamber-of-commerce-digital-forum-2021-annual-review/ Published: 15 October 2021 If you were around this time last year you might remember that I took over as Digital sector lead from Deb Byron at the AGM. The phrase ‘big shoes to fill’ was made for the situation. In fact ‘gigantic clown shoes’ might have been more appropriate, because Deb had shrewdly steered the Digital committee for over 20 years. I have had more than my fair share of moments in the past 12 months where I have felt imposter syndrome, but I’ve been lucky to have so much support from Deb, the team at Chamber, and the other members of our sector, who have helped me to settle into the role. Like every other sector, we have been disrupted by Covid. We have had nearly half of our meetings over video conference, and you might find it comforting to know – sorry, can you hear me? – that even the Digital sector is not immune to the technology issues that come with remote and hybrid meetings. We’ve made the most of it though, and dare I say our meetings have been downright enjoyable. I apologise in advance to anybody who sits on the chair I broke from laughing so hard last month. When you start a new role it’s always tempting to rush in and make sweeping changes. Well, trust me, I looked really hard at how things were being done and I couldn’t find any big, bold changes that needed to be made. I spent a great deal of time talking to the members of our group, and discussing the future with my counterparts in Chamber, but it didn’t seem necessary or appropriate to make a major transformation. That said, I did have two goals. I wanted to make the group more diverse and less formal – representative of the digital sector as a whole, which as you know, is made up of charming, good-looking people from a wide variety of backgrounds, who get up in the morning and put on their best shorts and flip flops for the office. When I first joined, our meetings took place at 8am, making them practically inaccessible to anyone with childcare responsibilities. We had as many members named ‘Chris’ as we did women and, as one of the younger members of the group (I am in my late thirties!) I remember feeling somewhat intimidated for a while, until I eventually found the confidence to speak up. I knew that we were making progress on the diversity and formality front the first time one of our members breastfed her child during the meeting (no, it wasn’t on Zoom), but there is plenty of work still to do. On that note, the Digital Forum (as we call it now – ‘Committee’ sounds so formal) welcomed new members from companies like BlueWave Communications, Riela Cyber, CND, Scratch and Readynez, and we will gladly welcome more members with an interest in the Digital sector – enthusiasm for tech is the only qualification needed. Besides asking our telecoms providers when Douglas Promenade will be dug up to install the telegraph poles, two things have cropped up in our meetings more than anything else. The first is skills and education. I continue to believe that education is the best lever that we can pull to improve our quality of life in the long term. Climate change, mental health, the future of work, the obesity crisis, vaccine hesitancy, religious and political extremism, the popularity of Love Island – all of these challenges benefit from a better-educated population. If we really wanted it, the Isle of Man could have the best education system in the world. No really – what is stopping us? Unfortunately, we hear about young adults leaving the island at the age of 18, and not returning until mid-life, resulting in a skills shortage in entry-level and mid-level roles. We hear worrying stories of teenagers leaving secondary school without the basic skills they will need in business or higher education, like the ability to write a report, give a presentation, or use spreadsheets to prove you can’t afford the mortgage payments on a house. These skills aren’t ‘digital skills’ anymore, they are bog-standard life skills. Twenty years ago, you’d put ‘Microsoft Word’ on your CV, but if you did that in 2021 people would look at you like you’d just coughed on their unvaccinated child. Just as we take it for granted that somebody can use Microsoft Word today, in ten years’ time we’ll take it for granted that a job applicant can edit a Youtube video, create a web page or write simple code. Some businesses and universities already do. We need to be ready for this or kids on the Isle of Man will fall behind. I’m happy to say that members of the Digital Forum were instrumental in attracting and establishing a high-quality provider of digital skills training, Readynez, to the Isle of Man. Readynez offers a huge range of courses. You can learn everything from entry-level digital life skills, to cloud infrastructure, to how to configure Cisco MDS 9000 Series switches (yes, that’s a real, 4-day-long course). My hope is that this goes some way to helping with our skills shortage, both by raising the bar in terms of local education quality, and by providing opportunities for those affected by Covid and the changing nature of work to retrain and find their potential in a new career. Finally, our other regular discussion point has been Cybersecurity, and especially ransomware, which is without doubt the most significant cyber threat to local businesses. From a physical security perspective, we are lucky to live on the Isle of Man, which is one of the safest places in the world. We leave our doors unsecured, and the worst thing that happens is that sometimes, somebody stumbles drunkenly into the wrong house and we all have a good laugh about it. Leave your router unsecured however, and you may wake up to find you have been penetrated by a North Korean. From a cybersecurity perspective, we are part of one open internet, at no less risk than anyone else in the world. In the Digital Forum we’ve had regular updates from our members on current trends, and we’ve been lucky enough to hear presentations from OCSIA and witness simulated cyberattacks in real time. If cybersecurity is a subject that you need help with, then any member of our forum can signpost you to appropriate assistance. You can also look forward to cybersecurity articles from our members in the near future. Alternatively, why not consider joining us? We meet at 9am on the last Wednesday of the month, usually at the Eagle Lab, sometimes on Google Meet. New members are always welcome! --- # Apple Silicon – A Literal Game Changer URL: https://scott.co.im/2020/11/19/apple-silicon-a-literal-game-changer/ Published: 19 November 2020 Apple’s switch to its own ARM-based chips (cleverly branded as Apple Silicon) is a really interesting move if you’re a techie. A lot has been written about the capabilities of Apple’s new laptop chip, M1. However, I thought it would be interesting to speculate on what the move could mean for Apple’s future products and services. First, lets rewind a little. In 2017, Apple announced the iPhone 8, with it’s in-house A11 Bionic chip. It was the latest in a long-line of ARM-derived processors, and the latest to dramatically outperform ARM’s own reference designs. It was also the first phone that was more powerful and efficient than the brand-new, Intel-based laptop I was using at the time, for many common tasks. Since then, Apple has updated it’s A-series chips on an annual basis, bringing significant improvements to power-efficiency, processing power, and graphics performance. The latest A14 Bionic chip makes this year’s iPhone 12 series far faster at every performance benchmark than any Android phone you can currently purchase – in fact, Android phones still haven’t caught up with last year’s iPhone. Now, Apple has taken that expertise and begun to apply it to desktop chips. The first chip, M1, is aimed at entry-level laptops and desktops (the MacBook Air, 13″ MacBook Pro and Mac mini). The results, so far, are staggering. M1’s performance is already up there with the very best AMD chips in the class and far ahead of the Intel chips that they replace. M1 represents a giant leap in performance and battery life that PC manufacturers will really struggle to match. And because of the shared architecture, M1 Macs can, in theory, run any app designed for iOS.  So what could this actually mean? What does it enable? ## Personal Users For many people, Macs have been a compelling choice for years, especially for iPhone owners due to the tight and elegant integration between the platforms. But with the M1 chip, Macs will be capable of things that PCs simply won’t. Instant wake from sleep for example. Battery that lasts an entire weekend, or an entire business trip. Apps that launch immediately. The difference in speed and battery life, and the use cases enabled by these advances, will raise the desirability of Macs still further… …and that’s before you take into account the huge number of iOS apps which will start to become available on Mac. The world’s 1 billion+ iPhone and iPad users will find that they already have a library of apps available to them. The fact that these apps can be used on multiple devices will become a real point of stickiness, keeping users in the Apple ecosystem. ## Games With M1, Apple now has console-class graphics performance. More specifically, the GPU performance of the integrated chip, at 2.6 teraflops, is behind the bleeding-edge consoles released this month (Xbox Series X has a 12 teraflop GPU!), but is notably better than the previous generation PS4 (1.84 teraflops) and Xbox One (1.4 teraflops). In short, the performance of Apple’s entry-level laptop chip is somewhere in between the previous generation and current generation of games consoles. If I was Sony or Microsoft, I would see Apple as a real threat. And if the rumours of a new, more powerful Apple TV are true, then they are months away from an unbelievably compelling gaming ecosystem. Remember, iPhone and iPad games can be relatively-easily adapted to work on M1, and many such games are already cross-platform with Apple TV. You can even connect your Playstation or Xbox controller, for a console-like experience. Console quality games that you can play on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Mac, with seamless handoff between devices? That’s pretty awesome if you ask me. Apple is well positioned to take advantage of this, with a huge library of games already available for iOS, and its Apple Arcade game subscription service (now also bundled into Apple One, the Spotify-killer). ## Enterprise IT managers generally don’t like to manage mixed ecosystems of Mac and Windows PCs, especially if they rely on Microsoft products (which generally work far better on Windows). However, Macs have always been a compelling choice for business. Any IT department that has bought a large number of cheap Windows laptops knows that this is a false economy. Macs, although more expensive to purchase, hold their value better and thus can be depreciated over longer, are far more reliable than PCs, are not as vulnerable to Cybersecurity threats, and for certain use cases (music production, graphic design, and video editing for example), they have better software available. Many IT managers still won’t want to adopt the new Macs, but because of their new capabilities, users will love them even more. This user demand may push organisations to embrace Macs or perhaps even get rid of Windows altogether. An Apple-only environment is far easier to manage than a Windows-only one. ## Conclusion In summary then, M1 is a huge leap for Apple with implications far beyond the Macs released this week. It is a leapfrog moment for Apple, which has long been in the lead for mobile chips, and has now moved ahead of AMD and Intel in terms of laptop chips. It won’t be much longer before they occupy pole position for desktop-class machines too. After that? The sky’s the limit. --- # Isai Scheinberg and Ray Bitar – My Experiences with Two Very Different Leaders URL: https://scott.co.im/2019/12/18/isai-scheinberg-and-ray-bitar-my-experiences-with-two-very-different-leaders/ Published: 18 December 2019 Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading stories from others about their experiences in the early days of the poker industry, working with some of the characters of the time. Dan Goldman, for example, recounts how he was hired to head up marketing at PokerStars (and tells many other great stories). Then we have Steve Badger’s ‘Stories from the Poker Boom’. For a poker geek like me who remembers a little of the good old days, these stories are gold. I’ve now been in this industry long enough that I have some ‘old timer’ stories of my own, many of which from my time working with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker between 2006 and 2011. I’m one of a handful of people to have worked for both Ray Bitar (Full Tilt Poker’s CEO) and Isai Scheinberg (Founder of PokerStars). In this article I thought it would be interesting to talk about my experiences with them, what similarities they had, and what made them different. ## My First Encounters with Isai and Ray I’d been working for PokerStars for a year and a half before I met Isai for the first time… To read the full article, visit CardPlayerLifestyle.com --- # How We Made Poker a Little Safer URL: https://scott.co.im/2019/11/06/how-we-made-poker-a-little-safer/ Published: 6 November 2019 This post was written in November 2019 when I was the Managing Director of Poker at Microgaming. At some point in our lives, we have all lost a bit of control. Maybe you hit the shops a little harder than you could afford. Maybe you went to a restaurant and ate more than you really should. Maybe you were browsing Instagram for longer than you realised and didn’t get much sleep that night. Other than the feeling of regret afterwards, these small lapses don’t generally cause us much of a problem. We are aware of the risks of overindulging, and so we set ourselves boundaries and we stick within them. We impose spending limits on the non-essentials. We get the starter, not the dessert. We set up the Screen Time feature on our mobile phone. We self-regulate and we stay in control. The same is true when people gamble. The Senet Group’s excellent report In Control, based on research from independent agency Revealing Reality, illustrates the strong link between control and enjoyment. To quote directly from the report: ‘To stay in control of their gambling, people set themselves mental boundaries to guide what they feel is and isn’t ‘ok’ for them – for example how much they spend, when they gamble, who they gamble with, or what games they play. As long as they stay within these boundaries, they stay in control of their gambling, and they continue to enjoy it. If people do not stay in control, they often no longer enjoy gambling, and they sometimes feel regret or remorse. Worse, they may experience gambling-related harm.’ Microgaming has long understood the need for players to self-regulate and we have provided many tools to help with that across all of our product verticals, including self-exclusion, session limits, loss limits and detailed records of player activity. Outside of my career at Microgaming, I’ve written repeatedly over many years to encourage players to keep good records of their play, and to analyse and improve their game. We saw our new poker client, Prima, as an opportunity to do things better in every sense. That meant designing the product to be more entertaining, but also included making more responsible design decisions along the way. Part of our vision for poker was a product that was ‘safe and fair’, and so I thought it would be interesting to focus on three choices we made that contributed to this vision. ## Highly Visible Profit and Loss When we launched our new software ‘Prima’ in July 2018, we rebuilt our Player History page from scratch and were faced with numerous decisions about what to include, and how to lay things out so that the information was easily understood. At Microgaming we never want to do the minimum. If we’d followed the letter of the regulations instead of the spirit, we would have just presented a long list of game transactions with a very small profit and loss figure somewhere in the mix. Some think it’s bad practice to emphasize to a player that they have made a loss. This comes from a genuine desire not to humiliate the player, and isn’t anything more sinister than that, but arguably makes it more difficult for a player to self-regulate. As you can see, we took the opposite approach and put the player’s profit and loss figure boldly in view. This is because we believe strongly that players need to know how much they are winning or losing, even if they don’t like what they see. From a poker perspective, it’s good practice to track your wins and losses closely, as part of your overall strategy to develop and improve your game. But from a safer gambling perspective, seeing this figure can sometimes be the reality check you need to stay in control. ## Big Blinds Instead of Cash They say that ‘the guy who invented poker was bright, but whoever invented the casino chip was a genius’. Casino chips (and plaques) allow players to play for sums of money that would be otherwise impractical, are an effective security measure, but beyond that, are a psychological abstraction from the real value of cash. It is generally accepted that this abstraction leads to increased play, although evidence for this is scarce. Some online gambling regulators have prohibited abstractions like coins, gems or other tokens and insist that the real value of money is always displayed. In online poker specifically, there has been a recent trend for online poker operators to provide an option to display the players’ stacks and bet sizes in Big Blinds, rather than monetary amounts. For serious players who might be multitabling many different stakes at the same time, or playing in a mixture of tournaments and cash games, there’s no doubt that such a feature is convenient. However, by providing a feature that hides the actual, real money bet amounts, might you be undermining a player who intends to stay in control of what they spend? Might it be easier for a player to underestimate what they are playing for, or not realise the size of bet they are calling? In tournaments, where the amounts being bet and called are already abstracted by virtue of the game format, and don’t directly relate to cash, you can argue that this feature is perfectly responsible. However, I don’t see how you make the same argument when it comes to cash games. At MPN we resisted the development of this feature and frankly, we have no regrets about this. ## Return on Investment In our final software release, v43, we have released a new Tournament Lobby. We spent an inordinate amount of time designing this feature to improve on what is already out there, and provide useful information that is relevant to the player. Doing this without creating information overload is very difficult, as you will no doubt know if you’re an online poker player. In designing the lobby, we faced a challenge. We know that some forms of poker make it harder for players to remain in control. For example, in an unlimited rebuy / re-entry tournament, you can quickly rack up a big spend, perhaps bigger than you intend. On the other hand, a lot of players really enjoy rebuy and re-entry tournaments, and they create huge prize pools which add to the excitement of the game. How do we balance the two? Our solution, much as it was with the new Player History app, was to put Profit & Loss front and centre. The ‘Return on Investment’ section of the tournament lobby is brand new, and something I hope that is emulated in the industry. It provides a mixture of useful information in a simple, compelling way. It serves the needs of serious players, who need simple ways to track their profit and ROI, and can serve as that much-needed reality check for somebody who is working hard to stay in control. ## Conclusion In the history of our poker product, one of the things I am most proud of is how we put player protection first – there has been a genuine desire to make online poker safer, and I hope that is evident in our product development. Often, this meant abstaining from designs or features which we felt undermined a player’s motivation to self-regulate. But occasionally, we seized opportunities to give players new ways to track their results and encourage responsible play, and that’s a legacy that we are proud to leave behind. --- # Show Us Your Stats URL: https://scott.co.im/2019/09/16/show-us-your-stats/ Published: 16 September 2019 This post was written in September 2019, when I was Managing Director of Poker at Microgaming. In recent months we’ve seen a trend for poker operators to publish statistics about their Game Integrity successes. In particular we’ve seen operators publish details about the number of bot accounts that have been detected and locked, how many accounts were refunded, and how much money was returned to the victims. This is a great step in the right direction. Previously, there was a fear in the industry about publishing this information. There was a sentiment that to do so would have no upside – you can never be perfect at detecting and preventing cheating, and any shortfall from perfect is a failure. Players would simply jump on the failures without recognising the successes, or so was the received wisdom. I give a lot of credit to the operators who stuck their neck out by publishing the information first. It made us think; we’ve been having debates ever since about whether we should do the same. The downside of course, is that the information that has been published so far is very subjective. Imagine that I told you that we’d locked 1,000 bot accounts in the month of August. Is that good? Perhaps there were 10,000 bot accounts operating on the site in August, so I only caught 10% of them. On the other hand, perhaps there were only 900, and so 100 were false positives and I actually seized money from innocent players. The number on its own tells us very little. Similarly, there is a huge difference in size between poker operators. If the market leader seizes €1,000,000 that is not the same as MPN seizing €1,000,000. So how do you make meaningful comparisons between poker operators and know where is a safe place to play, and where still needs to improve? In this blog, we’re going to show data which is more meaningful, and which allows for useful comparisons between us and other poker operators. My hope is that others will take up the challenge, and post data of their own which can be compared to ours. In other words, if you’re serious about Poker Integrity, show us your stats. Before we get on to the data, I’d like to highlight a few points about how to interpret it. First of all, any time you seize a large amount of money it generally means one thing. Cheats who feel like they are unlikely to be caught leave large sums of money in their accounts. Cheats who feel like they are at risk of being detected deposit the minimum to achieve their aims, and cash out as soon as possible. So if you see an operator seize a large amount of money, it generally means that they were behind the curve for some time, and finally caught up, catching the cheats unaware. You’ll see an example of this in our own data from August 2018, where we caught a large bot ring thanks in part to reports from players. Secondly, a consistently large amount of money seized or accounts banned is also revealing. Cheats should feel scared. We know from our undercover investigations that, in the last few years, cheats went from being indifferent about MPN to actively recommending that others in their community avoid us. If cheats keep coming back, that’s a bad thing. A lower amount refunded can actually mean that the games are safer. Without further ado, on to the data: Year Month % of MAU Who were Investigated % of MAU Who Were Locked Proactive Detection Ratio Proactive Detection Ratio (Bots Only) Total Refunds  (€) % of MAU Who Were Refunded 2016 Jan 6.4% 1.88% 97.1% 100% € 1,066 0.2% 2016 Feb 6.4% 2.01% 98.6% 100% € 5,315 0.3% 2016 Mar 7.4% 1.18% 98.9% 100% € 6,590 0.3% 2016 Apr 5.1% 1.15% 99.5% 100% € 65 0.0% 2016 May 5.2% 0.80% 96.7% 100% € 48,409 3.4% 2016 Jun 5.6% 1.35% 97.5% 97% € 49 0.0% 2016 Jul 5.2% 0.98% 98.5% 100% € 21,749 1.5% 2016 Aug 4.8% 1.20% 98.7% 100% € 1,692 0.3% 2016 Sep 6.3% 1.16% 98.1% 100% € 3,576 0.5% 2016 Oct 6.3% 1.07% 98.0% 100% € 3,855 0.6% 2016 Nov 5.6% 1.43% 99.2% 100% € 454 0.0% 2016 Dec 5.4% 1.77% 98.3% 100% € 16,751 1.3% 2017 Jan 6.1% 1.83% 99.4% 100% € 552 0.1% 2017 Feb 6.5% 0.91% 98.7% 100% € 18,647 1.1% 2017 Mar 5.3% 1.08% 96.6% 100% € 0 0.0% 2017 Apr 4.9% 1.15% 96.9% 100% € 20,045 1.2% 2017 May 6.0% 1.79% 97.3% 61% € 16,938 1.0% 2017 Jun 6.4% 1.69% 98.0% 100% € 35,936 0.8% 2017 Jul 5.9% 1.81% 98.3% 100% € 38,290 1.3% 2017 Aug 5.5% 2.03% 97.6% 100% € 11,321 0.7% 2017 Sep 6.3% 1.88% 98.7% 100% € 6,670 0.9% 2017 Oct 7.5% 2.66% 98.6% 100% € 5,910 1.2% 2017 Nov 7.2% 3.15% 99.3% 100% € 48,998 0.6% 2017 Dec 5.7% 1.84% 98.1% 100% € 2,764 0.2% 2018 Jan 5.5% 1.53% 96.9% 100% € 22,347 0.9% 2018 Feb 4.7% 1.36% 98.2% 100% € 42,587 1.6% 2018 Mar 4.2% 0.94% 95.7% 100% € 18,061 1.6% 2018 Apr 4.4% 1.25% 95.8% 95% € 14,283 0.9% 2018 May 4.2% 0.75% 98.5% 100% € 7,269 0.9% 2018 Jun 12.1% 0.80% 98.3% 100% € 8,716 1.1% 2018 Jul 11.3% 0.97% 99.7% 100% € 5,381 0.4% 2018 Aug 10.8% 1.37% 95.5% 89% € 318,784 1.3% 2018 Sep 9.0% 0.64% 97.6% 100% € 17,559 0.9% 2018 Oct 7.2% 0.78% 97.6% 98% € 97,338 1.3% 2018 Nov 11.8% 0.39% 98.0% 100% € 818 0.0% 2018 Dec 7.4% 0.79% 98.0% 83% € 43,065 0.5% 2019 Jan 13.5% 0.45% 100.0% 100% € 1,507 0.2% 2019 Feb 17.0% 0.41% 98.8% 88% € 31,817 1.3% 2019 Mar 8.9% 0.48% 99.5% 100% € 24,918 0.9% 2019 Apr 9.9% 0.87% 99.4% 100% € 61,760 0.7% 2019 May 10.2% 0.88% 99.0% 100% € 7,750 0.9% 2019 Jun 8.9% 0.46% 98.8% 100% € 1,046 0.2% 2019 Jul 12.7% 0.82% 98.3% 100% € 3,407 0.6% 2019 Aug 10.2% 1.05% 98.9% 100% € 46,366 0.6% Total 7.43% 1.25% 98.16% 97.97% € 1,090,421 0.78% Above, ‘MAU’ means Monthly Active Users. Only real money users are counted. The proactive detection ratio is the percentage of locked accounts that were identified through our own proactive procedures and tools, as opposed to as a result of a player report. For example, if 10 accounts were locked, and 2 were identified as a result of player reports, and 8 from our own tools, the ratio would be 80%. --- # Don’t Make this Common Mistake When Prioritising Software Projects URL: https://scott.co.im/2019/08/23/dont-make-this-common-mistake-when-prioritising-software-projects/ Published: 23 August 2019 Every company I’ve worked for has had one thing in common – they all generated good ideas faster than they were able to make them a reality. Regardless of whether they were a small start-up or a huge corporation, they all had a backlog brimming with ideas, and only so much time and resource with which to deliver them. They needed to prioritise their workload. Any decent product owner quickly realises the need to have a logical and defensible way to prioritise the backlog. After all, there will be many stakeholders with pet projects that they need to be delivered urgently. When it comes to something so important, arbitrary or ‘gut feel’ choices aren’t acceptable. With this pressure comes a mistake which is simple and very easy to make. It comes so naturally and seems so logical, but is the root cause of a phenomenal amount of lost value in tech companies. The mistake is to put the highest-value projects at the top of your priority list. At first glance that might sound outrageous, so I’ll be more specific. The mistake is to put the highest-value projects at the top of your priority list without first considering the amount of effort required to deliver them. The crucial thing to realise is that your goal is not simply to deliver the project with the highest value. Your goal is to maximise the cumulative value you deliver in a given amount of time. The highest value projects tend to be the largest in terms of effort, and by prioritising projects by their value alone, you may miss the chance to deliver maximum value over time. To illustrate this, lets imagine that you are choosing between two projects, and you can’t work on both projects simultaneously: - Project Major is a complete rewrite of your website. It will take 12 months to complete, but once released will deliver $100,000 of revenue every month. -  Project Minor is a change to your payments page. It will take 1 month to complete but will only deliver $15,000 of revenue every month. Most people, especially leaders without a technology background, will rush to deliver Project Major first, because it generates the most value. This is a reasonable instinct but misses the big picture. To see why, lets look at the cumulative value delivered if we prioritise the projects in two different ways. First, if we prioritise Project Major first, then deliver Project Minor: This choice delivers no value after 1 year, and $1,365,000 in value after 2 years. What if we do things the other way around, and put the lower value project first? This choice delivers $110,000 in value after 1 year, and $1,445,000 after 2 years. To make the comparison even clearer, lets look at both on the same chart: As you can see, putting the lower value project first actually generates more revenue over time – $80,000 more, to be specific. But it has other benefits too. First, value is generated earlier. This is important for many reasons, but especially where cash flow may be an issue. Money generated can be reinvested or otherwise put to good use. In the case where the Major project is focused on first, the business would go an entire year without generating any money from the development work. Secondly, risk is reduced. Large projects tend to be complex, and hence here is a greater chance that a mistake will be made, the requirements will change, or the project will overrun. When was the last time you heard about a large project being delivered on time? A simple way to prioritise, therefore, is to divide the value of each project by the amount of effort it takes to deliver it. In the case of projects Major and Minor, this is the result: Project Estimated Value ($ per Month) Estimated Effort (Months) Value / Effort Minor $15,000 1 15,000 Major $100,000 12 8,333 This methodology of prioritising projects is a simple version of ‘Weighted Shortest Job First’ (WSJF), so-called because it favours short projects but is weighted towards those with the highest value. Lets look at how we could use this same methodology to prioritise a longer backlog: Project Estimated Value ($ per Month) Estimated Effort (Months) Value / Effort A $       15,000 1 15,000 B $       20,000 2 10,000 C $       75,000 8 9,375 D $       50,000 6 8,333 E $     100,000 12 8,333* F $       25,000 4 6,250 G $     150,000 24 6,250* H $       35,000 7 5,000 I $     200,000 48 4,167 J $         2,000 1 2,000 *NB, where projects have equal value, deliver the shortest (lowest risk) project first As you can see, the gargantuan Project I doesn’t get a look in. In fact, if you assume that you will work on these projects sequentially, it’s nearly 3 years before you start on it. But this sequence of prioritisation delivers far more value than the alternatives. In reality, you are probably adding new projects to the backlog all the time, and it may be more than 3 years before you start work on Project I because other projects float to the top before it does. As a Product Owner you may have to work hard to justify the choice to deprioritise the highest-value project. Nobody said this was going to be easy! This begs the question – should you ever commit to huge projects in the first place? The answer is typically no, and you should ask tough questions of every huge project that is proposed. First – can the project be broken down into smaller constituent parts, each delivering incremental value? If so, each of those projects should be valued, estimated, and prioritised separately on the backlog. You may find that some of the constituent parts then float to the top, and valued is delivered more quickly. Secondly, if the project can’t be broken into smaller pieces, can you add more resources so as to deliver the project more quickly? Importantly, the project does not necessarily have to be reprioritised – the project can be delivered more quickly simply by working through the backlog with greater capacity available. If the expense of additional resources can’t be justified, then perhaps the project is not as valuable as first thought. Failing that, should it be done at all? Arguably, the bigger the project, the more certain you should be as to its value before you commit to it. If the methodology used to estimate the project’s value is weak, it should be challenged, and this should be addressed before the project is accepted. The chances are, if the project is huge and cannot be broken down into smaller parts, it is not worth doing. Even if delivered successfully, on time and on budget, market conditions are likely to have changed to the extent that the assumptions that went into estimating the project’s value may no longer be valid. Hopefully by this point, I’ve convinced you that you should take effort into account when prioritising software projects. The same principles can be applied to any projects, not just software (indeed, many of these principles have their roots in lean manufacturing). However, not all projects have a tangible value, and not all business value is revenue. It is not always easy to estimate the value of each project with great accuracy. Furthermore, it is not always simple to calculate the amount of effort involved in delivering a project. The next blog in this series will look at ways to estimate value for more esoteric projects, and ways to estimate effort that don’t require weeks of work themselves. In the meantime, comments and feedback on this first instalment would be greatly appreciated. Recap - It is a mistake to prioritise projects by their value alone. You should also take into account the amount of effort required to deliver each project. - Your goal is to maximise cumulative value delivered by your organisation, not necessarily deliver a high value project quickly. - A simple way to prioritise is to estimate the value and effort of each project, and then divide the value by effort to get a score. Then put the highest scores at the top of your list. - In general, don’t commit to huge projects. Break huge projects into smaller pieces, or resource up to deliver all projects more quickly. If this cannot be justified then the project is probably not worthwhile. --- # Hand Histories, HUDs & Tracking Software URL: https://scott.co.im/2019/06/17/hand-histories-huds-tracking-software/ Published: 17 June 2019 This post was written in June 2019 when I was the Managing Director of Poker at Microgaming. There has been a great deal of debate about hand histories, HUDs and tracking software in recent weeks. It’s something we have discussed extensively at MPN HQ, both among our management team and with our customers. Currently at MPN, players can use either our ‘Classic’ poker client, which is available for Windows only and is being gradually phased out, or the new ‘Prima’ software, available for all devices. The Classic software has hand histories which are compromised – full data is only stored for hands that you contributed to. In Prima, hand history files are not available at all. After reviewing all of the feedback we have received since the launch of our new software, and considering the ongoing debate, we have come to the conclusion that our current policy on hand histories is not right. With the best of intentions, we made a mistake, and so now we’re going to make changes. The general principles behind these changes are that: - Players should be able to track their own game, learn, and improve. - We want to be more transparent, and allow players to verify that we are doing a good job of keeping the games free of cheating. (We are, but you shouldn’t have to trust us). - We want to comply with the law around data portability. - We wish to reduce and limit the advantage that can be gained through the use of HUDs, seat or table selection software, and real-time advisory tools which use hand history data. ## 1. Request Hand Histories Players can now request a download of their hand histories. To do so, players should contact their poker room’s support team, specifying the date range for which they would like the hand history file(s). Hand histories are available from 1st January 2013 until now. The hand history will be provided as a .DAT file (which is compatible with HEM v8465 or earlier and PT v4.14.23 or earlier), with complete information about all hands you were dealt into, whether you contributed to the pot or not. Until we have been able to assess demand, requests are limited to one per week. ## 2. Hand History Files in Prima In the future, most likely in Q4 this year, we will add support to our new software to download hand history files to your device. Currently, we plan for the download to be available after a short delay (e.g. 24 hours) to strike a balance between tracking your own results, and enabling HUDs. Hand History files in the older ‘classic’ software will not be changed. ## 3. Easier Alias Changes Currently, players on the MPN can change their poker alias every 30 days, or 1,000 hands (whichever comes soonest). At some point in the future, we will make these changes easier and more prominent. We are keen to hear feedback on these proposals. Please feel free to leave your comments here, or contact us on Twitter @ThrillOfPoker. ## FAQ Q. Are you banning HUDs? A. At this point, no. We feel that the combination of freely-available alias changes and hand histories not being available in real time will greatly reduce the advantage of using a HUD. However, we reserve the right to change our minds and ban HUDs in the future. Q. Will the hand history files contain all hole cards of all players? A. No, only the hands revealed by the player (by choice, or because they reached showdown) will be visible in the hand history file. --- # How MPN Failed to Regulate Affiliates URL: https://scott.co.im/2017/12/18/mpn-failed-regulate-affiliates/ Published: 18 December 2017 This post was written in December 2017 when I was Head of Product for the poker and bingo business unit at Microgaming. It’s been a terrible few months for eGaming affiliates. The regulatory authorities in the UK have started to more strictly and consistently enforce advertising rules, and this has resulted in a number of operators tightening up their affiliate programs or even closing them entirely. Essentially, gambling operators are beginning to be held liable for the actions of affiliates who promote their brands, and they are understandably not willing to take this risk. With even stricter rules and enforcement on the horizon, including significantly more onerous data protection and privacy regulations, it’s difficult to see how the affiliate business has much of a future. For years, we have tried in vain to regulate the behaviour of affiliates. For a period in the late 2000s, the MPN struggled terribly with network ecology – a result of a small number of parasitic operators focusing exclusively on affiliate marketing and the promotion of rakeback and discounts, to the great detriment of other operators and the network as a whole. As a result, we implemented strict rules governing promotions and the types of marketing that were acceptable. Rakeback was limited to 30%, and rules were put in place covering deposit bonuses, reload bonuses, and the amount of money that could be spent on specific types of grinder-focused promotions like rake races and rake chases. Because MPN does not have any direct relationship with affiliates, we could only hold operators liable for promotional material that was in breach of the rules – exactly like the UK Gambling Commission, who don’t regulate affiliates and hence can only take action against operators. Over the years, rogue affiliate marketing has cost MPN operators hundreds of thousands of Euro in fines*. Almost all of these fines were because the affiliate intentionally set out to break the rules. We’ve seen it all – affiliates whose primary selling point is that they can get you 40% rakeback by sending you an extra 10% via Skrill, affiliates who will get you repeated reload bonuses, affiliates whose entire business is built on plagiarised articles and poker videos. Despite the fines, there has been no substantial change in the way that affiliates behave – new affiliates crop up regularly, seeking to break the rules. So right now, operators have no choice – stop affiliate marketing, or accept the fines – and many are choosing to stop affiliate marketing. Ever been on holiday to somewhere like Marbella or Malta, and walked through the tourist areas? Some affiliates remind me of the touts on the streets, who hand out flyers to nearby pubs or restaurants, or who offer a round of free shots if you’ll only come to the bar around the corner with all your friends. Bar owners, looking to drum up business, pay these touts commission depending on the number of punters they bring through the door – or perhaps the amount spent on food and drink. Have you ever taken up one of the touts offers and found that the bar or restaurant wasn’t what you expected, or was completely empty? How many of the best bars and restaurants in the world do you think rely on street touts to get business? Do Petrus, Sabor Brazil, and The Witchery need touts offering free shots to get people through the door? The analogy extends further. Stop paying the touts, and they’ll promote other bars. Not willing to offer free shots? They’ll promote other bars. Changed the food or drink you sell in a way that displeases the touts? They’ll promote other bars. Not happy with the way the touts are representing your bar’s brand? Screw you, they’ll promote other bars. Some bars become reliant on touts for all or most of their business. These bars inevitably close because it’s the only way they know how to attract customers – and when the touts disappear, so does their revenue. Truth is – any bar or restaurant worth going to doesn’t need touts. They add zero value, but infinite risk. This is a harsh comparison, and many will disagree with it. After all, in the eGaming world, there are plenty of affiliates that do add value. But they do this by creating compelling original content, or offering a unique and valuable service – not by offering 10% extra rakeback, or stealing content from other sites. Think sites that provide live reporting of poker events around the world, sites that offer compelling training material for new players wanting to improve their poker game, or perhaps even sites that offer odds comparison so that a player can make the bet that they want with the best odds possible. Sadly, reputable affiliates who operate ethically are being tainted by association to rogue affiliates – and with swathes of operators closing down or limiting their affiliate programs because of the risk of regulatory enforcement, this is a huge threat to the affiliate industry. So what can reputable affiliates do to protect themselves? MPN failed to regulate affiliates and change their behaviour, and I don’t think the regulatory authorities will have much more success. Honestly, I think the only solution is to self-regulate – form an organisation to represent the interests of affiliates and set standards that must be upheld in order to achieve membership. The eGaming industry has done this many times, forming industry bodies like eCOGRA which are now well-respected by regulators and operators alike. The affiliate industry should do the same – with a little time, membership of the organisation would come to represent integrity and trustworthiness, and operators could use it to decide which affiliates to work with, and which to avoid. Such an organisation would also solve one of MPN’s problems – we could simply require that our customers only work with affiliates who were part of the organisation, and forget about trying to regulate affiliates, which has proved futile for so long. 2018 is going to be a hugely challenging year for affiliates. The most reputable affiliates have a chance to save themselves – but will it actually happen? Time will tell. *These ‘fines’ are actually contributions to network promotions, and so go to players in the end. --- # Building a Better Fish Party URL: https://scott.co.im/2016/11/28/building-better-fish-party/ Published: 28 November 2016 This article was written in November 2016 when I was Head of Product for the poker and bingo business unit at Microgaming. When we launched Fish Party SNGs earlier this year, we introduced the industry’s first progressive jackpot to Jackpot SNGs. The problem is, when you’re first to do something, to a certain extent you’re flying blind. You probably won’t get everything right first try. Fish Party SNGs are a great example of that. When we first set out to design the game, we had ‘go big or go home’ in mind. So we created a game with a big initial jackpot, and big jackpot contributions, resulting in big prizes (as I write, the €1 jackpot is over 52,000 times the buy-in). To counter the large jackpot contribution, we made the operator margin very competitive – just 5%. But it wasn’t long after launch that we started to hear complaints. Problem is, the size of our jackpot contribution – 5.17% – was so large that when added to the operator margin of 5%, the effective rake on a single Fish Party SNG became 10.17%. Some players complained that this made it impossible to win, especially considering that Fish Party SNGs are super-fast, designed to last just over 5 minutes. My immediate reaction to the complaints was simply ‘we designed the games with recreational players in mind’, but after a little more reflection I thought ‘what if these guys are right and it’s not possible to win’? I believe that for a poker game to be successful, there needs to be a proper balance of luck and skill. Poker is not like roulette or slots, and players who play poker do so with different motivations. In any gambling game you need to deliver winning experiences frequently enough to keep players interested, but in poker the game must be beatable by some in the long term, or it’s not poker and a significant number of poker fans won’t play. Given that our initial maths model for Fish Party was just an educated guess, our new Market Insights team and I set out to find out how we could improve it. The first thing we realised is that it was indeed difficult to win – so difficult in fact, that very few skilled players were winning unless they somehow got lucky and hit a big multiplier or the jackpot. At this point we recognised that the feedback we’d received was correct. When even great players can’t win in the long term, the lifetime value of the whole player base is reduced because fewer games start. So we knew we needed to change. But what change to make? To find out, we first identified those Fish Party players with the highest lifetime value, and plotted this against ROI to see if we could find a ‘sweet spot’, where players within a particular ROI range had a highest value. We then created lots of new maths models, making one small configuration tweak at a time and simulating the effect on player ROI. The goal was to create a model which moved as many players as possible into the ROI sweet spot that we had previously identified. Compared to the original maths model, the new model is more bottom heavy. Players will hit the lowest (2x) multiplier less often, but hit a 4x or 6x multiplier more often (the 4x multiplier actually replaces the 3x multiplier of the current maths model). This results in a much improved ROI for skilled players, along with a lower probability that you’ll have the dreadful experience of hitting the bottom multiplier repeatedly. The only real downside is that the average jackpot size will decrease, because the progressive jackpot is increasing less quickly. The new maths model will be rolled out on 14th December, subject to regulatory approval. Nothing will change except the maths model, and all of the current jackpots (some of which are massive!) will be carried over to the new game. We will continue to monitor and tweak the game in the future, based on what our data tells us, and there are more Fish Party thrills to come in early 2017, as we add the game to our mobile and desktop browser platforms. ## More Fee Tweaks Since earlier this year we’ve been under a lot of pressure from our poker rooms to add fees to rebuys and add-ons in tournaments. There are many arguments for and against this change, some of which are flaky and some of which are undeniable. Two which are definitely true are: - Longer tournaments cost more to host. Bandwidth and hosting are two of the largest costs to any poker site. The argument is therefore that we should charge more for longer sessions – and rebuy tournaments are typically longer than the freezeout equivalent. - The more money is put into play, the higher the cost (in processing fees, risk, compliance etc). The argument is that because rebuy tournaments put more money into play they should be charged more. During September’s Universal Championship of Poker, we added fees to rebuys and add-ons by accident (this is easier than it sounds, our tournament creation tool ‘helps out’ by automatically adding a 10% fee to all buy-ins, rebuys and add-ons, and this is easy to miss). We took the opportunity to make an experiment of the mistake, which unfortunately proved inconclusive. We intend to run a proper experiment in January 2017, whereby fees will be added to a selection of the MPN’s rebuy tournaments. Each tournament will state clearly in its description that it is part of the experiment, along with the price of a rebuy and add-on. You can help us out by sending any feedback you have about this change to your poker room. We will take everything into account before deciding whether to implement such fees permanently. The counter to the above arguments is of course that shorter games should be charged less. I agree with that, which is why at the same time we will reduce the fees in Super Turbo scheduled tournaments. ## TL;DR - On December 14th, we’re reducing the effective rake on Fish Party SNGs from 10.17% to 5.85%. - In January, we’re going to experiment with fees on rebuys and add-ons in a selection of MTTs. - At the same time, fees on Super Turbo MTTs will be reduced. --- # How to Value Poker Players URL: https://scott.co.im/2016/03/23/value-poker-players/ Published: 23 March 2016 This article was written in March 2016 when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. Poker players are gripped in a mass delusion right now. They think that the more rake they pay, the more they are worth – and they couldn’t be more wrong. OK, that’s a tad dramatic. But there has been a lot of controversy lately about how players should be valued, and whether the talk of ‘poker ecology’ and an ‘unsustainable’ poker environment is just an excuse by poker operators to make unpopular changes. The discussions about this have revealed that the typical poker player doesn’t have any idea about how they are valued by their poker room, and simply thinks that rake paid = their value. Take these two forum threads for example: The Current “Unsustainable Poker Environment is a Myth” The Word and Trend That is Killing the Industry is (Poker Ecology / Economy / Environment) In those threads, the OPs argue that there is no solid evidence to support the argument that the current environment is unsustainable, that it is a myth and that the real reasons for the decline in game quality have been increased access to training materials (hence, tougher opposition) and increased segregation of players due to regulation (hence, less opposition). As it happens, I agree that segregation has had a devastating impact (especially on smaller providers). It’s why we don’t operate poker in Italy, Spain, or France anymore. And it is hard to argue that poker education isn’t better now than it was in 2004, when you were lucky if Amazon would deliver a Sklansky book to your country and weak-tight posters on RGP taught you to fold AQo to a button raise. But I also think that the poker ecology is a real, important concept. I hope that in this blog I can show that not only is it real, it is bloody obvious. ## Symbiosis When you play an online slot game (like Microgaming’s Fish Party game), the actions that you take affect only one player – you. If you win €100 in a single spin, then no other player loses out. If you lose €200, no other player benefits. If you want to shout about how rigged the game is or how much you want the green fish to get cancer, no other player cares. That is obviously not the case in poker. In poker, you have a symbiotic relationship with the other players at the table. In fact, almost everything that you do affects the value of other players. This intricate web of relationships between players is what we mean by ‘poker ecology’. Imagine going to a bar. It’s a cool place, with great-looking people and a nice atmosphere, and it’s playing exactly the kind of music you love (as long as it’s not hip hop). Suddenly, without warning, Satan himself walks in. Satan takes a seat at a booth, which he has reserved for himself and his twelve slavering bull mastiffs. He calls over the barman and orders a case of the most expensive champagne, two bottles of Louis XIII, and a box of Churchills for afters. Quite a bar tab! He pulls over two horrified women to sit on each of his hellish knees. The problem is, people are starting to leave. The women are getting tired of being called over to sit on Satan’s knee. The men are getting tired of being bitten by the dogs. Nobody is buying a drink, that’s for sure. By the time Satan has left and the staff have cleaned up the pools of blood and dog drool, the bar has taken €10,000 for the night. Problem is, the bar would normally make €20,000 on a Saturday. What’s more, the Satan story spreads, and next week, the bar is only half as busy as usual. The point is, Satan’s presence has directly affected the profitability of the bar even though he himself spent a lot of money. In fact, Satan cost the business money simply by being there. The same principle applies to poker. The most obvious way to affect another player’s value is to lose money to them. If you lose €100 to an opponent, then you’ve increased that opponent’s spending power, like buying them a drink in our hypothetical bar. They are now able to wager at least €100 more than they were before, and some of that €100 is probably going to turn into rake. You have increased your opponent’s total lifetime value. The counter to this is that you can affect another player’s value by winning money from them. Now they have less spending power, and there is less opportunity for them to generate rake. You have reduced your opponent’s lifetime value (like accepting a drink at a bar). MPN’s True Value method for valuing poker players, which has been in operation since June 2012, is invisible to players themselves (who still see the weighted-contributed method). Among other things, it ranks all the players at a given stake level, from biggest winner to biggest loser. It then assigns a player value which is higher for net losers and lower for net winners, reflecting the fact that somebody who is a net loser is actually worth more to the network than their weighted contributed rake would suggest, because by losing they’ve increased the spending power of other players. We use this valuation method to reward operators without impacting players themselves. A slightly more abstract way to increase value to a poker site is to deposit. By depositing, you increase your own spending power, and the total financial liquidity of the player pool increases. By the very nature of the game of poker, this money flows between players and some of it turns into rake. The more money is available to the player pool as a whole to wager, the better for the poker operator. On the flip side, you can decrease value to a poker site by cashing out. This has the exact reverse effect, reducing your spending power and reducing overall financial liquidity. You can see clearly that some poker operators are extensively focusing on attracting deposits because of these factors. Notice that, although I have highlighted that depositors and losers are worth more than you might think if you looked only at their Weighted Contributed rake, I haven’t said that winners or net withdrawing players are actually BAD for a poker ecology. The truth is far, far more complicated and this is where everybody seems to be tripping up. ## Your Real Value It should now be obvious that just because you’ve paid €1,000 in weighted-contributed rake in your time with a poker site, doesn’t mean you are actually worth €1,000. Your real value depends not only on the rake you generate, but also how you impact the value of other players around you. For example, let’s say you play Heads-Up against one opponent, and generate €10 in rake. Your value in that session is not €10 – it depends on how you impacted your opponent’s value. Perhaps you won money from them really quickly and, to top it off, called them an idiot in the chat box, causing them to quit for the day. Overall, you reduced their lifetime value by €20. This means that your value is not €10 – it’s MINUS €10. You’ve actually cost the poker site money by playing that session! You are like Satan in our hypothetical bar. Playing in a six-handed session is more complex. During such a session, you might increase the value of some opponents, and decrease the value of others. Your real value for that session is the sum of: - Your own direct value (i.e. rake you generated) - The net amount by which you increased (or decreased) other players’ value This is so self-evidently true that I don’t think it can reasonably be disputed, but it’s where many players are going wrong. They think they should be treated as one of a site’s most valuable players, when in fact, they might be Satan to that site! It’s obvious that winning and losing (and, in a more indirect way, depositing and cashing out) impacts your real value during a session. But there are lots of other ways to impact other players value. For example, you can increase an opponent’s value by: - Being a fun or exciting player to play against - Chatting and making them feel welcome, thus encouraging them to play longer - Playing a loose style – i.e. getting involved in big pots with them - Starting a new table – giving them an opportunity to play when there might not have been otherwise - Playing quickly - Doing many other things we haven’t thought of yet You can decrease an opponent’s value by: - Abusing them in the chat – causing them to quit or play shorter sessions - Playing excessively slowly - Making them feel targeted or predated upon (for example, parasitic tactics like using a seating script to instantly sit with the fish) - Cheating against them (for example, colluding with a friend) - Playing an extremely tight style - Being a dull, unexciting person to play against - Doing many other things we haven’t thought of yet To the best of my knowledge, all of the current methods of player valuation ignore these factors, and hence, miss a major part of the picture. As an example, lets take a professional poker player (continuing our biblical theme, we’ll call him Daniel). Daniel is a winning player overall, and he’s famous. He’s so famous that many people really want to play against him, and they’re prepared to deposit with your poker room for the very first time in order to have the chance. When Daniel goes to the bar, he is the life of the party. People love to listen to his jokes and stories. He doesn’t spend much money at the bar himself, as he’s constantly accepting drinks from his admirers, who came to the bar just to see him. When Daniel plays poker, he beats his opponents because he’s the best player. However, he also makes them feel welcome, and spends time to chat with them about poker strategy and the lifestyle of a pro player. He gets involved in pots, he’s fun to play against, and he never cheats or bumhunts. Many of his opponents would never have deposited in the first place if it wasn’t for Daniel. All of the current valuation models (including our own True Value) would say that Daniel was worth less than his Weighted Contributed rake. He wins money, reducing the spending power of his opponents. He also never has to deposit, he just cashes out his winnings from time to time. But it should be obvious that Daniel is worth far MORE, in fact he is exactly the kind of player that a poker room wants! In the last ten years we’ve changed the way we value players several times: - Level 1: Hands or hours played - Level 2: Dealt rake paid - Level 3: Weighted Contributed or Winner Take All rake paid - Level 4: Dual Layer systems like True Value, Essence, and SBR It’s time for us to move to Level 5, and factor in everything about a player’s impact on the ecosystem. Otherwise, we might reward Satan at the same time as our bouncers are escorting Daniel out of the bar. The good news is, we already have our data scientists (that’s right, we’ve got data scientists!) working on a quantifiable way to do exactly this. The intended result is to value players correctly, factoring in not only the rake that they generate but also their impact on the lifetime values of everybody they play with. We can then reward players far more intelligently than the industry does now, and in a way that doesn’t penalise winners simply because they are winners, or reward depositors simply for depositing. ## …and Finally There’s another thing that affects a player’s value to a poker site, and that’s how much rake you charge. If you charge 100% rake, then nobody plays and you don’t make any money. If you charge 0% rake, then lots of people play but you still don’t make any money. There is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, where you maximise the amount of revenue you earn because you’ve set rake at the ideal level – one that allows players to have a positive experience but doesn’t leave money on the table either. Let’s say for argument’s sake, the relationship looks like this: It’s no secret that we are searching for that sweet spot, nor is that something we are ashamed of. With the significant rake overhaul we made in October last year (and the similar overhaul we made to Sit & Go fees in February) we moved much closer to that point. We will probably tweak rake further in the future, and this might mean raising it or lowering it, depending on what our research says about what is most sustainable and profitable in the long term. With that said, I will make you some promises. As long as I am responsible for poker: - We will not increase rake in 2016, unless forced to do so for legal, regulatory or similar reasons - We will never increase rake without telling you about it first - We will never increase rake without giving you reasonable notice of the change I am really shocked by what some of our competitors have done in this area lately, as it goes directly against what I believe is right for poker. We won’t be making the same mistakes. We are now the cheapest place in the Top 10 to play cash games by a significant margin (and since we’ve been focusing on the poker ecology for nearly 10 years, we also have the juiciest games around). I hope that you’ll share this with your poker-playing friends. --- # The End of Shortstacking? URL: https://scott.co.im/2015/11/06/the-end-of-shortstacking/ Published: 6 November 2015 This post was written in November 2015 when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. Many years ago I wrote for a magazine called InsidePoker Business. It was edited by Alun Bowden (@Poker_Hack), and fellow contributors included Kim Lund (@InfiniteEdgeKim), who now runs his own consultancy business, and Barry Carter (@Barry_Carter), who is now a freelance journalist. It’s become something of a running joke that we were writing articles back then about topics which the industry is only beginning to address now. As an example, check out this article I wrote back in 2011, where among other things I mention the ‘English only’ chat rule and why it needs to die in a grease fire. One of the first things I did as Head of Poker at Microgaming was to eliminate this rule, but that didn’t happen until May 2014, and as far as I know we’re still the only network where you can speak any language you like. In another delightful example of our collective foresight, Kim Lund wrote an article called End the Spread about cash game buy-in sizes back in 2013. One particular quote stands out to me: I’d argue that those in the know either min buy-in to try and hit-and-ruin the game or they buy-in max to make sure they’re not at a disadvantage. All other possible choices are moot. At the time, we didn’t have the data available to test his theories, but now we do. So we set out to determine, once and for all: - What buy-in amounts people prefer - How this influences their likelihood of winning - Which players are more valuable - Whether we should change the buy-ins – either increase them, decrease them, or do as Kim suggests and take the choice away entirely The conclusions are interesting, at least if you’re a poker geek like me. ## What We Did First I tried to analyse a couple of million rows of data in 32-Bit Microsoft Excel. It was a painful few hours before I realised this was a bad idea, and upgraded to the 64-Bit version. It was an even more painful few hours before I realised I was better off getting our Business Intelligence experts to do this properly… Together, we looked at 2,273,022 actual buy-ins on the MPN which took place earlier this year, before we introduced the Grouped Lobby feature. We filtered out non-Euro games, and the €0.01/€0.02 stake, because this is the only stake level on the MPN where it’s possible to buy in for less than 30BB. We also filtered out auto top-ups, and looked only at the first buy-in to the table (almost all auto top-ups are to 100BB). At this early stage, we discovered that the players who perform the worst are those who have no discernible strategy when buying in. For example, if you take between 80 and 89.99BB to the table, chances are that it’s the last bit of money in your account. You’re probably on tilt and playing badly, and hence players who buy-in for this amount lose the most money per buy-in of any group. To ensure that our data wasn’t skewed by players playing just a couple of times and blowing off their last few Euro, we focused only on players who had made 10 or more buy-ins, and who tended to buy in for the same amount, i.e. players whose buy-in was in the same category 60% or more of the time. About 57% of players who buy-in more than 10 times have a clear preference like this. ## The Results A whopping 85% of cash game buy-ins are for exactly 100 big blinds, which is the maximum in the majority of our games. The next most popular buy-in level is exactly 30 big blinds, the minimum in most of our games, with 8%. These are followed by exactly 40BB (3%) and exactly 50BB (2%). There is clearly a strong preference for 100BB play – only 2.5% of players have never bought in for 100BB. Players who buy in for 100BB are also the most likely to be winners – 47% of players who buy in for 100BB are net winners after rake. 44% of those who buy in for 30BB are winners. That might seem close, but it isn’t because the amounts won and lost are significantly different.  100BB players make up 82% of players, but win 92% of the money. 30BB players make up 11% of players, but win just 4% of the money. A 30BB player loses over 6 times as much in their lifetime as a 100BB player, and 14 times as much per hand played (100BB players play more hands). This is despite the fact that they are much tighter, putting 56% less into the pot than 100BB players. There is definitely no evidence here to suggest that 30BB players have an advantage overall. I’m fully aware that in poker theory, there are situations where having a 30BB stack should give you an advantage – I read Rolf Slotboom’s Pot Limit Omaha book after all. But there is no indication that this is actually playing out in practice on the MPN. So far, all of this could be explained by saying that 30BB players are predominantly casual, and hence more likely to lose. There is lots of evidence, which I won’t share here, that shows 30BB players to be more casual than other groups. Similarly, you can argue that the most skilled players tend to buy-in for 100BB, and so players at this level are more likely to win. So far, we’ve only demonstrated a correlation, and not causation. But what if you take a 30BB player, and make them buy in for 100BB? We introduced our Grouped Lobby feature in April this year, and as a by-product we moved some players from the 30BB category to the 100BB category. That’s because the Grouped Lobby has a ‘Play’ button which automatically seats the player with 100BB, and this is the default interface for all players. At the same time, for unknown reasons, a small number of players went from buying in for 100BB to 30BB (perhaps they read Rolf’s book). We were able to pinpoint those players that changed from 30BB to 100BB, and vice versa, and see the impact on their stats. The group of players who moved from 30BB to 100BB immediately showed better results. In fact, they went from losing money on average, to actually winning money on average. Their P/L improved by a factor of 3, after rake. Players who moved from 100BB to 30BB immediately showed worse results. They went from winning money on average, to losing money on average, and their P/L declined by a factor of 2.5. What’s more, 30BB players pay more rake per hand played. This is probably because they are so often all-in before the flop, as this is a key part of the shortstacking strategy. However, because they lose more quickly, their lifetimes are shorter than 100BB players and they are worth less to a poker room. This is quite conclusive evidence that the buy-in is a causal factor in determining whether players win or lose, and it suggests that 30BB players might have a better experience if they were to buy in for 100BB instead. ## The Experiment Since a lot of players hate to play against shortstacking opponents, and it appears that players who buy-in for 30BB would actually have a better time if they played for 100BB, we’re going to try an experiment. On December 1st, we will change all Omaha Hi/Lo tables on the MPN to only allow buy-ins of exactly 100BB. We will carefully monitor the impact, and if it is neutral or positive we will then roll out this change, gradually, to Omaha Hi and eventually to Hold’em. If at any point the impact is negative, then we will revert to the current setup. One side-effect of this change, which we’re already seeing to some extent because of the Grouped Lobby, is that it will force players to manage their bankroll better, and play at tables they can better afford. If you’ve deposited €50, the highest NL/PL stake that you’ll be able to play will be €0.25/€0.50 – you won’t be able to play at €0.50/€1 as you could previously. Our data shows that this will make your money last longer, and suggests that you’ll have a better time. If all this works out, we’ll have another question to answer – is 100BB the optimal buy-in amount after all? But that question can wait until later. --- # Why Most Women Don’t Play Poker URL: https://scott.co.im/2015/09/01/why-most-women-dont-play-poker/ Published: 1 September 2015 This blog was written in September 2015, when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. Opinions on women in poker are like bad beat stories. Everyone has one, and most of them are horrible to listen to. As a man it’s even harder to write an opinion on the subject without coming across as delusional, demeaning, or daft – all words my female colleagues used to refer to me after writing the first draft of this blog. But here are my thoughts on the subject anyhow. ## The Intimidating Nature of Live Poker When I ask female poker players why they don’t like to play live, the answer is often that they find it intimidating. -Lydia Barbara, Head of Pegasus Gaming Solutions Relatively few women play online poker. Our best estimates are that between 9% and 19.4% of online players are female (a recent study of French players states the higher end of the range, but the worldwide average is almost certainly lower). The figure is even lower for live poker – according to Alex Dreyfus of the Global Poker Index, only 3-4% of live poker players are female, and only 5.43% of entries in the 2015 World Series of Poker were from women. There a huge difference between online and live participation, and nobody seems to know for sure what the reason is. One possible explanation is that the live poker environment is intimidating to women in a way that the online environment is not – and this is something that some live tournament organisers have tried to address with ladies events. But ladies events are controversial. There is a vocal group of men who believe that men should be allowed to enter ladies events, or that ladies events simply shouldn’t be allowed, because they discriminate against men. But, in my opinion, that group of men is missing the point entirely. Victoria Coren Mitchell wrote an excellent series of blog posts about this, way back in 2012, starting with ‘Pick on Someone Your Own Size’. She described an experience with a man who had decided to play the ladies event, and spoiled the fun for the women involved: He was young, sallow and hooded. He was the first person to join our table without smiling or saying hello. The mood changed immediately. It had been so cheery, everyone gossiping and laughing and swapping stories – the one tournament where, even if you get knocked out, the money feels well spent on a fun day. It was relaxed and giggly… …But when this kid sat down, the mood changed. The sorority was broken. The fun stopped. The older ones on the table looked particularly sad. One of them asked whether he’d told his mother he was playing this tournament, and whether she had anything to say about it. He ignored the question. It’s very common for women to have a ‘girls night out’, where men are not invited, and it’s not as if men don’t have lads nights out. I have home games where only men are invited. So why is it so controversial for women to want to play poker exclusively with other women? In the professional poker world, ladies events are not prestigious. No woman is going to win the GPI Player of the Year award because she performed well in a ladies event. And women aren’t asking for ladies events to be taken seriously, or be given worldwide acclaim. From what I’ve heard, they simply want a fun and friendly environment in which to play. I’m of two minds about ladies-only poker events. On the one hand, I wish they weren’t necessary. I wish more women would jump into male-dominated games. But they aren’t, and that needs to be addressed somehow, even if for no other reason than that [online] poker internationally is on the decline. -Lydia Barbara, Head of Pegasus Gaming Solutions But why do some women need ladies events to enjoy themselves? Why is normal live poker so intimidating? I struggled with the answer to this for a long time, but I’ve recently come up with a theory. My epiphany came from reading about the Everyday Sexism project. The project, founded in 2012, collects experiences from women all over the world, describing the harassment, prejudice, and sexism that they experience on a daily basis. It makes for truly harrowing reading, with over 50,000 entries from women documenting their day to day experiences. As a man, I’ve experienced harassment in the street a handful of times in my life. What shocked me about Everyday Sexism was just how often it happens to women – every day, in many cases. Of course, to women this comes as no surprise. To men, I ask you to talk to the women in your lives. You will find that the experiences described by Everyday Sexism are not unique. Almost every woman you know will have been harassed on the street, groped in a bar by a stranger, or worse. The harassment doesn’t stop when a woman sits down at the poker table, either. There is even an entire 2+2 thread dedicated to stories of men harassing women at the table. Last night after playing for several hours (same casino), I’m a in multi-way pot and I wind up with a straight flush. Not a huge pot, but I make some money off two other flushes. One of the guys involved says, “If the seven of diamonds comes, I totally rape you.” – ‘chairmanmyow’, 2+2 poster Now, I fully believe in the right of free speech and I don’t think that ‘being offended’ should give you special rights. Being offended is a choice, after all. But why on earth do so many men decide to exercise their right to free speech in a way that makes women feel unwelcome at the poker table? Getting told something like “If you win this hand I’ll rape you” isn’t benevolent ribbing. When you grow up in a country like the US where 1 in 6 women are subject to some sort of sexual violence, a statement like that isn’t a joke: it’s a credible threat. I do wish that men were a bit more alive to this. Our life experiences are different to theirs. What may be funny or appropriate to a man may not be to a woman. It isn’t because we’re humourless; it’s because so many of us have been subject to harassment and worse. So many women have been physically, mentally or sexually abused. You know at least one rape survivor, although you may not know who or how or when. It just isn’t talked about. Anonymous female American poker player The first part of my theory is that many women are so used to being harassed by men in everyday life, they (perhaps unconsciously) tend to avoid situations where they will encounter a lot of unknown men. Not only that, but some of the few women that do join a live poker game are immediately scared away by the behaviour of a minority group of horrible men. But there is a second question to be answered – even online, where the intimidation factor is greatly reduced, the fact that over 80% of the players are male means that a lot of women are choosing to do something else with their leisure time. So why don’t these women consider playing poker? ## Poker as a Masculine Activity The second part of my theory is that many women never even consider playing poker, because poker is considered, in our societal norms, to be a masculine activity. To illustrate the problem, consider the very words that you use in everyday life. If you were dividing words and phrases into ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, where would you put words like ‘blue’, ‘pink’, and ‘pretty’? Most people would have no problem putting ‘blue’ into the masculine column and ‘pink’ into the feminine column. But they are both just colours, so why do they have such strong gender associations? More controversially, where would you put words like ‘career’, ‘president’, or ‘poker’? It’s clear to me that from the minute we are born, we’re trained that some things are masculine, and some things are feminine. If you’re a parent expecting a boy, you’ll buy blue clothes – and you won’t even consider pink. When your kids are a little older, you’ll take them to a toy shop. One side of the shop will be pink, and will feature awful things like cookery sets, toy vacuum cleaners, dolls and ironing boards. The other side of the shop will be blue, and will feature awesome stuff like dinosaurs, buckets of goo, lightsabers, science kits and action figures. If a boy wants to play with a doll, he’s told that ‘dolls are for girls’. If a girl wants to play with a science kit, she’s told to play with dolls like a normal girl. These gender roles are reinforced not only by adults, but by children themselves. Notably, some institutions are taking steps to counter this kind of gender stereotyping in their stores. US retailer Target, for example, recently announced that it was no longer going to label particular toys as for ‘girls’ or ‘boys’ – something UK retailer Toys R Us has already done. But these changes are very recent, and most people of a legal age to play poker today will have been exposed to these gender roles all of their lives. If this is true, you’d expect countries which have less of a gender gap (according to a source like the Global Gender Gap Index) to have a higher proportion of female poker players. Microgaming doesn’t have the data to conclusively prove or disprove this theory (as a software supplier, we don’t have personal data about players). However if you rank female participation in our MPN Poker Tour live events in order from highest to lowest, it correlates exactly with the rankings of the Global Gender Gap Index – we had the highest proportion of female players in our United Kingdom event (26th place) and the lowest in our Georgia event (85th place). If the trend continues to hold true I expect to see the highest proportion in our Dublin event this week (Ireland is in 8th place). This second part of my theory is that both men and women have been trained from the moment that they are born that there are certain activities that they shouldn’t engage in. For the same reasons that most men don’t play netball, softball, or camogie (which gender roles say are a feminine activity), most women don’t play poker. They don’t even consider playing because they feel that it’s a masculine activity. This is an extremely complex problem that is difficult counter in the short term. ## Final Thoughts Because poker is a male-dominated activity, a lot of poker-related marketing is targeted at men in a way that makes the problem worse, not better. An off putting element for me is the sexualisation of women in poker. It seems you fall into one of two groups: - The model who knows how to play but doesn’t need to be good because she is hot. Case in point, this YouTube video. I can’t imagine Phil Ivey was ever asked to strip down to his boxers and sprawl across a poker table, and even Kara Scott is pictured in this with dollars between her teeth. - Vanessa Selbst -Clodagh Hansen, Poker Promotions Manager at Microgaming This kind of marketing does nothing to attract female players. Those women that do find the game in spite of the marketing have to first battle against something in their mind that says it’s not really an activity that they should be doing, and then when they finally sit down in the game they are often harassed simply for being there. Like most working women, the balance of work required in the home falls largely on my shoulders ([my partner] still manages to play online and live!) -Clodagh Hansen, Poker Promotions Manager at Microgaming There are other reasons too, of course, not least of which that women tend to have less free time because male partners don’t spend as much time on household chores or childcare. This issue is far too complex to be discussed in a single blog post. Thankfully plenty of other people are talking about the topic at the moment – I found Lee Davy’s post on empathy towards women particularly frank and interesting. There is no quick fix to the problems we face. Real changes will come from changing attitudes – both men’s, and women’s. All of us need to pass on the lessons we have learned to the next generation. We should challenge harassment and sexism whenever we see it, and we should be teaching our children, whether male or female, that they can be whoever and whatever they want to be. No gender roles. No excuses. If we do this, imagine what a boom poker is going to go through in a couple of generations’ time, when the other half of the population starts to really join in! --- # A World Without HUDs URL: https://scott.co.im/2014/12/12/world-without-huds/ Published: 12 December 2014 This blog was written in December 2014 when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. In my last blog, I discussed the network’s stance on seating scripts. In this blog, I want to talk about HUDs – and for the first time ever, draw some conclusions based on real data and evidence. For a long time, I’ve heard players and poker operators bemoaning HUDs. Lots of players complain that they are unfair. I’ve also spoken with several poker operators who think, based on nothing but speculation and their own personal feeling, that HUDs should be eliminated because the advantage that they give is too large. My own stance is that the industry should have banned HUDs ten years ago, when third party tools were in their infancy, because they undoubtedly make the game less fun (both for the people using the HUDs, and their opponents). Now they are part of the game, like it or not, and too many players are too invested in the HUD lifestyle to go back. But I have never considered HUDs to be an unfair advantage, and I like tracking software – I think it’s very important to be responsible about your poker play, and tracking software makes it easy to track your results and improve your game. Never has anyone actually provided any real evidence showing that using a HUD is an unfair advantage. In fact, nobody has ever proved that using a HUD gives an advantage at all. Nobody has ever bothered to do any proper studies, after all these years. Everybody has been guessing – until now. On the MPN, we offer both regular tables and Anonymous Tables. We weren’t the pioneers of anonymous tables, but I think we might be the only network that has both regular and Anonymous Tables, with good traffic in both. On regular tables, HUDs and tracking software are explicitly allowed and we know they are used (although we don’t know what proportion of players use them). On Anonymous Tables, HUDs and trackers are useless, and for practical purposes they can be considered ‘HUD free’. This allows us to study the game conditions on both types of tables, and draw some inferences about the effect that the presence of HUDs has on the games. Although I have made a great effort to be accurate, to use a statistically significant sample (about 175 million hands) and to compare ‘like for like’ (I’ve excluded Heads-Up play, Blaze Poker, tournaments, and any games or stakes where both table types are not spread) this is not a scientific study. This isn’t going to be published by a peer-reviewed journal. I am not going to release the underlying numbers, which are obviously confidential. So to some extent, you will have to trust me that my calculations are correct. If it helps, I’ve been doing this for a pretty long time. With that said, here are my observations, comparing the HUD-free world of Anonymous Tables to their non-Anonymous counterparts. ## Observation 1: Anonymous Tables are Less Popular, but still significant No surprises here. Overall, 40% of cash game players choose to play Anonymous Tables. Anonymous Tables do tend to polarise players – many think they are a bad thing for whatever reason. In addition, players who like to use HUDs will obviously avoid anonymous tables. Nonetheless, 40% of cash game players playing in a game is a huge proportion – imagine how different the poker landscape would be if 40% of players played Blaze Poker, Jackpot SNGs, or Omaha. ## Observation 2: Anonymous Tables get more popular as the stakes increase, to a point The popularity of Anonymous Tables is lowest at micro stakes, increases for low stakes and further still for medium stakes, and then drops again at the highest stakes. My guess is that, the lower stakes somebody plays, the more conservative they are about their game selection, and that the element of the unknown brought about by Anonymous Tables is enough to put players off. The higher up the stakes you get, the more likely you are to recognise the benefits of Anonymous Tables and seek them out. The drop in popularity at high stakes is interesting. It may be because at these stakes, games start less frequently, and perhaps game starters tend to prefer non-anonymous games. Perhaps there is more table selection going on (which only really makes sense in non-anonymous games). Or perhaps high stakes players will simply take any game that they can get. ## Observation 3: Anonymous Players Play Fewer Hands Playing with a HUD makes it easier to multi-table. So it’s no surprise that mass multi-tablers stick to regular tables. But there is another reason that anonymous players play fewer hands, as we will see. ## Observation 4: There is Much More Action at Anonymous Tables Everything you’ve read so far is just a preview to this, the main event! Anonymous tables are much, much juicier than regular tables: - There are more called bets in each hand - More money is bet and called in each hand - The average size of each called bet is larger - The average pot size is larger Essentially, more money changes hands in anonymous games, per hand dealt. This is the case at every stake, but is especially prominent in micro stakes, where the average amount bet and called per hand is a whopping 20% higher at Anonymous Tables than at regular tables, and the average bet size is 19% higher. Rake per hand is also higher at anonymous tables, which is expected given the larger pot sizes. There are several possible reasons for this. Maybe loose players seek out anonymous tables, but this seems unlikely. I think the most likely explanation is the inverse – tight players seek out regular tables, where they can use their HUD. This tight playing style means they give and receive less action, and pots are smaller as a result. ## Observation 5: Winners Win More at Anonymous Tables Because more money changes hands, winners win more money per hand played at anonymous tables than they do at regular tables. This is a no-brainer when you think about it – just because the pots are bigger doesn’t change who the winners and losers are. Good players are still good players, even when HUDs aren’t a factor. Another possible explanation is that the very best players seek out anonymous tables, knowing that they would be avoided at regular tables.  Anonymity gives them a chance to get action that they wouldn’t ordinarily get, because they’re so good. ## Observation 6: Losers Lose More at Anonymous Tables, and Go Broke Quicker Despite Observation 5 being so obvious, I think this will be a bit of a surprise to many. Again, because more money is changing hands, losers lose more. Bad players’ mistakes are amplified because pots are larger. When they bluff the river and get snapped off, that river bet is typically bigger. This will probably shock those operators who bet the farm on Anonymous Tables, thinking that they would protect new and weak players. Our evidence says that they don’t. In fact, weak players lose more and have an even shorter lifetime than they would if they played regular tables. This is the other key reason that anonymous players play fewer hands – they have already gone broke. ## Observation 7: Variance is Higher at Anonymous Tables With bigger pots and more showdowns, it makes immediate sense that there is more variance in Anonymous games, just as there is more variance in Omaha compared to Hold’em. So even though on average, winners win more and losers lose more at Anonymous Tables, a player who is a long-term loser has a better chance of winning in the short term. By the way, if you ever wondered why some operators like to push Omaha and other non-Hold’em games, this is a key reason – long term losers have a better chance to have a good experience in the short term, because variance is higher. They still lose, but at least there’s a better chance of them coming back. To share a little anecdote with you – a while ago we did some SNG research, looking at which variant was the best in terms of survival rate for new players. The worst? No Limit Hold’em Double Ups. New players had almost no chance to win. Even Omaha Hi/Lo, an incredibly complex game for new players, did better. When it comes to giving new players a chance, variance is a good thing. ## Observation 8: A Winner’s Win Rate, Net of Rake, is Higher at Anonymous Tables Even though winning players pay more rake at Anonymous Tables, they also win more money. The net of this (winnings – rake) is higher at Anonymous Tables than it is at regular tables – i.e. the increased rake is more than made up for by the increased winnings. Could it be that playing in games with a HUD actually costs you money? ## Conclusions From these observations, I think we can make some pretty clear statements about the effect that the presence of HUDs has on the games. - In games with HUDs, there is less action. Players bet less, and when they do bet, the bets are smaller. Pots are smaller as a result. - In games with HUDs, players multi-table more. - In games with HUDs, winners win less, because pots are smaller. - In games with HUDs, losers lose less, also because pots are smaller. - In games with HUDs, winners pay more rake per Euro they win (but less per hand, because pots are smaller). - In games with HUDs, variance is lower, and poor players are more consistent losers as a result. Those are some pretty damning conclusions for HUD users. They are also damning for the ‘HUDs are evil’ crowd, because the data doesn’t support the idea that HUDs give you an advantage. In fact, the very opposite – the data suggests that HUDs make the game tighter, less fun, and make everybody win and lose more slowly. Although in HUD-filled games you will pay less rake per hand, this is simply because pots are smaller. In the course of your lifetime, you’ll pay more rake per € won in games with HUDs. HUDs are probably an advantage if you are the only one with a HUD. But are they an advantage in games where everybody else is using them? Not that I can tell. Using a HUD is a bit like choosing a sniper rifle and camping on a rooftop in Call of Duty. As long as everybody else is running across open ground firing pistols, then you have a nice advantage. But if everybody else becomes a camping sniper too, then all of a sudden the game stops being fun. So in 2015, why not give Anonymous Tables a try? There’s no camping allowed. ## Epilogue – About Cheating at Anonymous Tables The most powerful argument against anonymous tables is that they must be a magnet for fraud and collusion. Players can’t police the games if they are anonymous, and report suspected collusion and cheating. This is also an argument that is often used to support datamining, a practice which is prohibited by the MPN. But the fact is, players just aren’t that good at spotting cheating. On the network side, we have sophisticated tools to detect collusion and other types of unethical behaviour, and we are improving these all the time. We can investigate millions of hands in a very efficient manner. Players cannot do that, and that is borne out in the statistics too – 97% of the Game Integrity cases we investigate are proactively generated, and just 3% are reported by players or operators. Our evidence shows that cheaters sometimes do choose Anonymous Tables, but of course, this is no impediment to our tools (the tables aren’t anonymous to us). In fact, the use of anonymous tables can sometimes be a dead giveaway – it is difficult to find somebody you know at an anonymous table, because you can’t see their alias. If two related players end up on the same anonymous table – or even multiple anonymous tables, then contrary to what you might expect, such players actually stand out from the crowd and become easier to catch. --- # The Scripts URL: https://scott.co.im/2014/10/27/scripts/ Published: 27 October 2014 This blog was published in October 2014, when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. On the MPN, we’re very transparent about our approach to third party assistance tools, like trackers and HUDs. For those that want to use them, or don’t mind playing against players who might be using them, we have plenty of tables at which they are allowed to be used. For those people who prefer not to use such tools, or who don’t want to play against people using HUDs or trackers, we have Anonymous Tables, where their opponents’ names are obscured. At these tables, there is little point in trying to track opponents because the game doesn’t specify who they are. We believe that this distinction is a fair one, and it accommodates everybody. Want to use your HUD? Sure, you’re welcome to use it at regular tables. Want to avoid players using HUDs? No problem – play at Anonymous Tables. We support this policy by taking active measures to make it harder for people to use HUDs at Anonymous Tables. We have asked the maker of the two most popular tracking tools not to support HUD use at these tables, and we’ve done things to break HUDs on purpose, like changing the names of all Anonymous Tables to be the same (which also helps to deter collusion). We’re now at the point where a HUD is all but useless in these games. We also don’t support HUDs and tracking software in Blaze Poker. This attitude has undoubtedly made Blaze Poker less profitable for us, but we feel that players should have a genuine choice between tracking and no tracking. All in all, this approach, and other aspects of the way we run the network, gives us the best game ecology that I’ve ever seen. I have worked with several major poker sites and companies, and the MPN has a higher proportion of winners than any of them. Put simply, it’s easier to win on the MPN than anywhere else, at least in my experience. Recently, I’ve started to see a great deal more discussion about a particular kind of third-party tool, the seating script. There are many different types of scripts, but the kind everybody is concerned about is the type that monitors the tables for weak players, and then instantly seats the user with a weak player when one is found. The poker rooms on the MPN have received occasional complaints about seating scripts, and some of this feedback gets passed on to me. Incidentally, all of the complaints are from serious players, and not casual players (who are hurt the most by the use of the tools). Casual players simply aren’t aware of these scripts, and I think most would be horrified to find out about them. The systematic targeting of weak and casual players is undeniably predatory, but is it fair? Is it right for us, as the network, to allow this to happen? Good game selection is one of the most fundamental principles of winning poker, so should we get involved in determining what types of game selection are allowed and which are not? In order to seat their user at a desirable table, a seating script needs access to a database of players, because it needs to know who is weak and who is not. So generally, such a script interacts with a tracking program to get that data. This means that seating scripts don’t work at anonymous tables, because tracking programs can’t gather data on who is a winner and who is a loser at anonymous tables. At first glance, our current policy appears to be doing its job. Don’t like scripts? Play at anonymous tables. I’m often asked why we don’t take action against scripts already. One reason is that we have games where scripts simply don’t work, so the problem simply isn’t as big on the MPN as it may be on sites which don’t have anonymous tables. But another reason is that we don’t currently have any reliable way to detect when somebody is using a script to sit at the tables. On the forums, players have stated with some authority that it must be easy to detect when a player is using a script. Certainly, if you designed your software from scratch, bearing in mind that you would want to detect scripts, then it would be fairly trivial to detect them. The problem is that it is absolutely not easy to build this into software that already exists. Not impossible, but very difficult and very time consuming. Players have rightly pointed out that this isn’t a reason NOT to ban such tools. There was a time when it was difficult for companies in the industry to catch bots, because we didn’t have the tools that we now have. But it was easy to fairly enforce a ban on bots – when you caught one, generally it was a black and white case. The problem with seating scripts is that the cases are often grey areas, and it’s extremely difficult to apply a ban fairly and consistently across the whole player base. Arguably, such a ban could result in a more uneven playing field than before the ban. On a personal level I am concerned. I’m a diehard poker fan, and the game is becoming something that I don’t like anymore. It is evolving in a way that is taking it away from its roots as a game of personal skill and honest competition among peers. I don’t want poker to become a game where the person who has the best software, or who is able to best take advantage of their software, is the ultimate benefactor. In my opinion, poker should be a test of wits – you versus your opponents. Who has worked the hardest to improve their game? Who has the guts to make the hero call? Who dares to move all-in on a bluff, knowing that if they are called, it’s all over? There is also the very serious issue of mobile. Six MPN poker rooms offer our mobile software, and there are many more on the way. Players using the mobile software (many of whom only play on mobile) can’t use tracking programs, HUDs, or seating scripts. So unlike with our regular download client, these players can’t equalise the advantage given by third-party tools, even if they wanted to. Since the industry is irreversibly heading into the mobile age, that means that more and more players every day will not be playing on a level playing field. There’s nothing wrong with looking for an advantage. There’s nothing wrong with tracking your own results – in fact, one might say that it’s the only responsible way to play. I have nothing against winners – I think they should be celebrated and looked up to, so that new players can aspire to be winners themselves. Our network certainly does not discriminate against winners (even though we do reward operators for bringing in players who are not winners, with our True Value system). But we know from experience that when the game organisers allow some players to gain an excessively large advantage, the games die. The video games industry knows this very well. Take Titanfall, currently one of the world’s most popular first person shooter games. Played exclusively online, Titanfall has had no less than eight updates to date, adding new functionality and rebalancing the game when necessary – say, when a weapon was found to be too powerful. In the days before online poker was popular, No Limit Hold’em had all but died out in poker rooms. It was typically played with no limit on the maximum buy-in. New players sat down with a fortune relative to the blinds, and lost huge amounts of money against their more experienced opponents. It wasn’t fun, so the casual players went to play Stud or Limit Hold’em instead. It was only when online poker came along, with its 100BB cap on the buy-in, that No Limit Hold’em was rebalanced and became fun once more. Arguably, we are now at a point where the game of online poker needs to be rebalanced again, just like Titanfall. The weapon that is the seating script has become too powerful, and there is a lot more at stake than just points – the entire future of the online poker industry hinges on whether the game remains fun or not. On the MPN, seating scripts are currently allowed, but that will not be the case forever. When we have determined a way to reliably detect such tools and fairly enforce a ban, then we will rid the game of them without a hint of regret. In the meantime, we will be making lots of changes in 2015 aimed to make third-party programs less powerful. Winners will still win, and losers will still lose. But the game will be more fun for those that play. --- # What Does the MPN do to Protect Player Funds? URL: https://scott.co.im/2014/08/14/mpn-protect-player-funds/ Published: 14 August 2014 This blog was written in August 2014 when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. The very first post on this blog was about why the MPN doesn’t communicate with players. In that post, I described how poker operators are our customers, and how we have no direct relationship with players. I also mentioned that the MPN doesn’t hold any player funds. To quote exactly, I said: The MPN doesn’t register players. We don’t hold players’ money (ever, even for a second). For many operators, we are one of a number of suppliers, who provide products and services – of which ours is poker. That blog was picked up by some of the poker media and was generally received positively. Nick Jones of PokerFuse Pro published an article on the blog which was neutral to positive in tone, except for the following which refers directly to the quote highlighted above: Microgaming has always held this stance, for which it has been heavily criticized by online poker players and online gaming affiliates in the past. On more than one occasion, operators on Microgaming’s poker network have shut down—including high profile closures like Battlefield Poker and Eurolinx—leaving players and affiliates out of pocket. The network stance of “we are just a software provider” meant the network would not help players pursue funds nor offer reimbursements. Though Microgaming does not hold player funds, a network clearing house to reconcile funds occurs at the network level. Microgaming has indeed been heavily criticised in the past for this, and continues to be. On 2+2, certainly the world’s most influential poker discussion venue, players still regularly ask if it’s ‘safe to play on Microgaming’, and this really bothers me. In this blog, I’d like to address these issues bluntly and honestly, with the hope of instilling some confidence and good faith in the MPN. ## The Past Operator Bankruptcies In the past, two Microgaming customers have gone bankrupt while they offered poker as part of the Microgaming Poker Network (now known as the MPN). These problems resulted in liquidation and the loss of player deposits which were held by those operators. They were Tusk Investment Corporation (in 2008) and Linx Media Group (in 2009). In addition, two other operators were terminated by Microgaming in 2012 and went into liquidation some time afterwards (in one case, the operator joined another poker network first). Company bankruptcies are not rare – in the United States alone, 34,892 businesses went bankrupt in 2013. In the UK, 14,990 businesses were liquidated in the same year. Of course, most companies do not hold large amounts of funds which belong to the public, so the impact of these bankruptcies is often limited to the employees of the companies, their suppliers, and other businesses. The poker industry has had its fair share of bankruptcies, which is why it’s so important for poker operators to protect players’ funds against that possibility. In all of the above cases, it would appear that the operators had not protected their players’ funds, and eventually used the players’ cash as if it were their own. ## My Background Although I have no first-hand experience with the above bankruptcies, nobody knows the effect that they can have on people better than me. In February 2011, I moved to Dublin to start an exciting new job in product design, at what was then the world’s second-largest poker site, Full Tilt Poker. Exactly two months later, Black Friday happened, and it gradually became clear that the company was insolvent and couldn’t pay what it owed. The effect on players, including many of my friends, was totally heart-breaking and I have no doubt that the insolvency destroyed lives. Watching Bet Raise Fold: The Story of Online Poker, which charts the story of Black Friday through the eyes of several players, moves me to tears even three years later. Players, and others who were affected by the above insolvencies such as affiliates and the friends and family members of those affected directly, have my utmost sympathy. The events of 2011 caused me to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about the protection of player funds. My wife, who is a senior auditor for a big four accountancy firm, taught me a lot about the legal mechanisms that are in place to protect client funds. When you buy a house for example, typically a legal firm will hold money in segregated client accounts until the contract is fully executed. For example, they might hold your deposit on the house, before forwarding it to the seller upon completion of the contract. Most countries afford a level of protection to client money held in this way, and there are industry bodies who regulate exactly how client money must be held in order to ensure maximum protection. When I started my job at the #2 site in 2011, and received the explanation about how funds were supposedly protected, there were tell-tale signs of trouble that I could have spotted, had I known what I know now. Should I be exposed to similar explanations in the future, I will be informed enough to spot these signs. ## The Clearing House PokerFuse’s article touches on the clearing house, so I’d like to explain here what that is, how it works, and why it doesn’t contain any player money. On a poker network, players from different poker rooms are playing against each other all the time. Let’s say that Player A wins €100 from Player B. Player A’s operator needs to be credited with €100, and that money needs to come from Player B’s operator. So Player B’s operator pays Player A’s operator €100. In reality, thousands of players win and lose each day, so every operator owes every other operator some money, but some of these cancel each other out, and this can be a complex issue to solve. The clearing house system makes this simple. Every operator is required to deposit a small amount of money in a clearing house account. This deposit acts as a ‘float’. Each day, we sum up all of an operator’s players’ wins and losses. If an operator’s players have lost money overall, money is deducted from their clearing house, and if their players have won money overall, money is added to their clearing house. This has the same effect as moving every win and loss, without the need to make thousands of small transactions. The Network Rules regarding the Clearing House are crystal clear – the money in the clearing house does not belong to players. Two reasons for that are: - The amount of money held on behalf of each operator in the clearing house is small – just enough to cover the net movement for the operator’s win or loss – and is nowhere near enough to cover their total liability to players. - It would be inappropriate for Microgaming to hold player money since it has no relationship with players, and has no knowledge of the amount of money held in each player’s account. That final point was originally discussed in my first blog post. It is extremely important to note that, for most of our customers (i.e. poker operators), Microgaming does not have access to detailed account information and does not know how much money is held in the accounts of players. If you asked me how much money was in your account with an operator, for example, I would not know, because most operators don’t share that information. We have no idea what an operator’s total player liability is – we have no right to know, since some of that liability may relate to other products not supplied by Microgaming. However, an operator’s licencing body may require them to file regular reports on their player liability (as is the case in Malta, for example). ## What Microgaming Does to Protect Players (and Operators) I get the feeling that in the past, many involved in the running of poker networks believed that size was the most important factor. There was prestige in having the largest number of operators on your network, and sales teams were keen to sign up as many new operators as possible. One of the lessons that we have learned is that it is more important to have a few high-quality operators, than lots of low-quality operators. Low-quality operators hurt other operators on the network, as they generally rely on poaching high-volume players and not on delivering value through marketing to new players. Furthermore, low-quality operators may place their players’ money at risk. My predecessor did a lot of work to clean up the MPN and remove low-quality operators, and since then we have been very picky about who we signed up. We could have a higher PokerScout ranking, and could be making more money if we had not been so picky, but we have turned away operators who we felt didn’t fit our network strategy. When we do decide to do business with somebody, the process that we follow to ensure that they are trustworthy is extensive. Every prospective new operator goes through a probity process. This is our way of ensuring that we know who we do business with. Among many other things, the process includes analysing the structure of the company and determining who the beneficial owners are – i.e. who eventually gets the profits. It also includes discovering the company’s source of funding. The process is very thorough, and it quickly exposes operators who are potentially unstable or not serious. We require every operator to hold a valid gaming licence (this might seem obvious, but there are poker networks out there who do not require this). Regulators such as Malta, Isle of Man, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Estonia all require an operator holding their licence to segregate and protect player funds, and report on their liability regularly. Making this requirement part of our contract allows us to quickly terminate any operator who has their licence revoked, protecting the other operators and players on the network. Our network rules are clear about how operators must manage their money. They require operators to protect funds deposited by players, at the very least by maintaining one or more segregated client accounts, not used for any purpose other than holding player funds. Operators are also required to notify players as to how their funds are protected in the event of the operator’s insolvency. Finally, we are very strict about how operators manage their clearing houses. Every operator has a minimum balance, which depends on their level of activity. If an operator’s balance decreases below this threshold and this is not immediately resolved, then their players are ‘ring-fenced’ from the rest of the network – i.e. that operator’s players can only play with other players from the same operator. This helps prevent any damage being done to other operators on the network. In the event that an operator’s clearing house drops into the negative, they risk having their poker client shut off. Thankfully, clearing house issues are very rare. ## How Our Operators Protect Player Funds The MPN has a nice variety of poker rooms, including smaller boutique operators focused on a particular type of player or part of the world, and huge publicly-traded operators with global reach. This is one of the reasons why our games are so good – there is something for everyone. There is no reason to believe that our smaller boutique operators are less safe than the larger ones. Any player with concerns about the safety of their funds should contact the poker room on which they are playing and ask questions. To save you time, I have already written to every one of our poker operators, asking for a statement on the issue. Here is what I asked: … I will be publishing something on the MPN blog in which I discuss the importance of protecting players’ funds. For this blog, I require a statement from each poker operator that details how players’ deposits are protected in the case of insolvency. A brief example would be ‘Here at [Operator], we keep all player funds in trust and do not use the funds for operational purposes. This means that in the unlikely event of insolvency, players funds would be protected.’ Operators may be as brief or as detailed as they wish in their response. The responses will be published verbatim on our website, mpn.poker, with a link to the operator’s website. Operator responses are listed below, in the order that they were received. I have published the responses exactly as received, without any editing (except formatting), and it’s worth bearing that in mind along with the fact that English is not the first language for some of our operators. If an operator is not listed, then that operator has not yet provided me with a response. This section of the post will be updated as and when new responses are received. Paf Here at Paf.com, we keep all player funds in several different bank accounts clearly designated as client accounts and they can’t be used for operational purposes. This means that in the unlikely event of insolvency, players’ funds would be protected. PokerLoco Here at PokerLoco, we keep all player funds in segregated bank accounts and do not use the funds for operational purposes. This means that the player funds are always safe and protected since these bank accounts are designated client funds accounts, even if the unlikely event of insolvency, the players funds would be safe and protected. Stan James At StanJames.com Poker, we ensure that all player funds are ring-fenced from operational cash to ensure that in the highly unlikely event of insolvency, player’s funds are protected. PokerHeaven At Gaming Media Group, protection of player funds is paramount for all brands including PokerHeaven.com, HeavenCasino.com and HeavenBet.com.  We segregate, safeguard and report on player funds to comply with the requirements of our Gaming Licences provided by the Maltese LGA.  As such, we maintain ‘ring fenced’ bank accounts – separately from our working capital – to match and safeguard our players’ account balances. Betmotion Here at Betmotion.com, we do not use player funds for operational purposes. This means that in the unlikely event of insolvency, players funds would be protected and all players will be able to get their money back. 100% safe! Furthermore, we have a financial policy which ensures we benefit from a very stable financial background and have contingency funds should any situation require it. iGame (24hPoker and Pokerihuone) We have clients accounts approved by the LGA for the protection of player funds.  Every month we also make a report to the authority with all balances including screenshots of such accounts.  These accounts are strictly for player funds. On top of that our auditor at the end of the year confirms such balances and accounts in the audited accounts. BetInternet Under the terms of its Isle of Man operating licence, betinternet operates separate client bank accounts that securely hold all of its clients’ funds. These accounts are protected so that in any circumstances, the clients’ funds will always be separated from any of betinternet’s company operating funds. BetVictor Monies deposited with BetVictor are segregated in a bank account in the name of BetVictor with other customer deposits, which holds the monies in the account for you and other persons entitled. As such, in an insolvency situation you would be entitled to claim any monies held for you in such an account. OlyBet At OlyBet the trust within players is very high since OlyBet is subsidiary of PLC Olympic Entertainment Group AS (OEG). Olympic Entertainment Group AS with its subsidiaries operates a total of 93 casinos in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus and Italy. OlyBet is highly trusted due to being a subsidiary of PLC, all the financial transactions are audited by external auditors and reports are available for everybody. The players highly appreciate a possibility to play both Live and Online games within the same company, the synergy between the two is creating an excellent gaming experience. Betsson Group (Betsson, Betsafe, Bets10, Dhoze, NordicBet, Triobet) At Betsson Group all customer deposits and account balances are held in separate bank accounts with regulated, tier-1 financial institutions. Sportingbet (Superbahis, Betboo) Headlong Limited is licensed and regulated by the Lotteries & Gaming Authority (LGA), Malta. Headlong complies fully with the LGA’s regulations which includes extensive player protection measures and in particular, relating to the security of player monies. As you can see, our operators take the issue of player fund protection seriously. You should never be afraid to question an operator on this issue, because an operator who has nothing to hide does not fear being asked. ## Public Companies Publicly-owned companies are required to produce year-end accounts, which have been audited by an independent third party. In these accounts, you can typically see the profit or loss that the company made on their products (including poker), the amount of cash the company has, and information about the company’s debt. The Directors are required to assess whether there are significant doubts about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern and to disclose any uncertainties in the year-end accounts. There is also an audit opinion, in which the auditor confirms that the accounts give a true and fair view of the financial position of the company and have been properly prepared, in accordance with the relevant accounting standards and company law. If there are material doubts about whether a company is a going concern (i.e. whether it is in a position to continue doing business for the foreseeable future) then the auditor must declare this in their audit opinion. While being a public company is no guarantee against insolvency, the audit opinion and an examination of the accounts may help to reassure you that your money is safe and secure. Here are links to the corporate pages of our publicly-owned poker operators: - 32Red PLC - Betsson Group AB (Betsson, Betsafe, Bets10, Dhoze, NordicBet, Triobet) - Olympic Entertainment Group AS (OlyBet) - Ålands Penningautomatförening (Paf) - GVC Holdings Plc (Sportingbet) ## Summary No online poker room, no matter how large, can guarantee that they will never become insolvent. In fact, no business in any part of the world can ever guarantee this. All a poker room can do is to take good-faith measures to protect player funds in the unlikely event that something bad does happen to the company. Microgaming is picky about who we do business with, ensuring that we only deal with operators who have real potential and who won’t undermine the poker network. We conduct extensive probity on new operators to ensure that the owners have no ties to unethical or illegal business practices. We apply stringent requirements on our operators, requiring them to be licensed and to protect player funds as a matter of course. We keep a close eye on operators to ensure they pay their bills on time, so that players and other poker operators don’t lose out – and we take action to protect players and operators if there are problems. However, the bulk of responsibility to protect players lies with operators themselves. Microgaming holds only a small amount of money per operator, and doesn’t know an operator’s total player liability. While we can take measures to limit risk, there is only so much that we can do to protect money that we don’t hold ourselves. Going forward, I hope that players choose to play with operators who show the most commitment to the protection of player funds, and that this becomes a competitive advantage in the marketplace. There are many such operators to choose from on the MPN, and Microgaming is dedicated to working with them to improve this protection in any way we can. --- # Saying ‘Adiaŭ’ to the English-Only Chat Rule URL: https://scott.co.im/2014/05/30/saying-adiau-english-chat-rule/ Published: 30 May 2014 This blog was written in May 2014, when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. Throughout the history of poker, there have been many bad rules. Not being allowed to check-raise, for example. Or being forced to bet a seven. Over time, most of those rules have thankfully died out. Today at the MPN, we are consigning another bad rule to history – the ‘English only’ rule. One of the great things about poker is that it changes over time and evolves. The game is very different now to ten years ago, when online poker was still in its infancy. That in turn is totally different to twenty years ago, when just 268 players entered the Main Event at the World Series of Poker. Thirty years ago, you would struggle to get a game at all unless you were willing to travel long distances, or you lived in California or Nevada and could play a mean game of Jacks or Better. Since online poker as we know it first hit our tiny 640×480 screens in 1998, the player base has changed beyond recognition. Back then, most poker players were American. Accordingly, the majority of poker players spoke English – almost everyone in fact. Because the player base was so homogeneous, it made sense to have a rule that forbade players from speaking any other language. After all, two people speaking in a language that nobody else understands – they could be colluding, and nobody would know about it. Any downside to having the rule was minimal, since it affected such a small number of people. In 2014, poker has grown so much in other parts of the world that for several years now, not only have the majority of poker players not been American, they haven’t spoken English as their first language. Live poker tournaments recognise that the English-only rule doesn’t work all the time. If you play a tournament in Rome, for example, you can speak English or Italian at the tables. If you don’t speak Italian, then tough. After all, ‘when in Rome…’. But online, the English only rule persists, and players who chat in other languages are actually penalised for doing so. They are warned, or their ability to chat is revoked. Since most players don’t speak English, this leads to an environment where nobody chats at all. How ridiculous is it that a table can consist entirely of people who speak and understand Danish (for example), but they are not allowed to chat to one another? Consequently, the game becomes less social, and less fun. So people who play for fun stop playing, the game gets tougher, and everybody complains about how the game has become unbeatable and how they need to play more tables to eke out the same win rate as last year. A common reason to keep the rule is that it would be difficult to police collusion-related chat. I have spent a long time working in this industry, and have been involved in Game Integrity for most of that time. I honestly can’t remember a single case where colluders used the chat box as part of their scheme. The fear of collusion is understandable in theory, but it just doesn’t happen much in reality. In addition, our methods for preventing and detecting collusion have come a long way in the last 10 years. There is no point keeping a rule simply to appease fear. Lets be honest – there’s also a little bit of bigotry baked into this rule. I delight in the possibility that by making this change I will be upsetting the world’s xenophobic. As of now, whatever language you speak, whether it be English, Georgian, Latin or High Valyrian, you are welcome on the MPN. We will still police grossly offensive or disruptive chat, regardless of the language, but if you just want to chat with your friends, you can speak (or type) any language you want. As far as I know, we are the first poker network to make this change, but I hope we are the first of many. We will all be better off if poker players can have fun and socialise, regardless of the language they speak. --- # Why Doesn’t the MPN Talk to Players? URL: https://scott.co.im/2014/05/14/doesnt-mpn-talk-players/ Published: 14 May 2014 This blog was originally published in May 2014, when I was Head of Poker at Microgaming. It was one of the first things that I asked after joining the MPN in 2013. We were making some changes to tournaments, and I wanted to get feedback from players as to what they liked and what they didn’t. The question was ‘why don’t I post in the forums and get some feedback on this’? I’m sure I’m not the only person who has wondered why we don’t do this, or why we don’t meet players or survey them, especially when many poker operators are doing so. Forums in particular can be a great tool for a poker manager. In my previous roles in the industry, I’ve dealt with forums on a regular basis. I’ve found that, especially if you post in an official capacity, you’re almost guaranteed to get extensive feedback. Plus, posting publicly helps boost the image of your brand by showing that you care about players’ opinions, and it helps you to get a feel for what drives and concerns real people. Forums have their downsides of course. They tend to be frequented by more serious players, and consequently many of the suggestions you get benefit this small minority, rather than the majority of casual players. Plus, when things are going badly, forums can be a harsh and unforgiving place. Many a poker manager has damaged their brand’s reputation by dealing with negative feedback in an unprofessional way. Plus, although I can read and understand a few European languages, I can only write competently in English. Posting only in English means that you miss out on the chance to communicate with a huge proportion of today’s poker players. But I would love to post in forums. Overall, the benefits far outweigh the downsides. But I can’t, and here’s why: ## You are not my customer. Let me elaborate on that a little. Poker players are not the MPN’s customers. Our customers are poker operators, to whom we provide software and related services.  Poker players are a step further removed – they are our operator’s customers. The MPN doesn’t register players. We don’t hold players’ money (ever, even for a second). For many operators, we are one of a number of suppliers, who provide products and services – of which ours is poker. An operator’s player database is one of the most valuable things they own – maybe even the most valuable, since they can’t do business without it. Every player who has signed up with an operator is an asset, with a value (which can be quite low in the case of a long-inactive play money player, or very high in the case of an active high roller). Operators are very protective about their player database because it would be extremely valuable to their competitors. Operators don’t share much information about their customers with the MPN. We get the information that we need to prevent cheating and fraud, but nothing personally identifiable like a name or an email address. Not only would sharing this information create some issues with Data Protection law, but operators don’t want to share this information with anyone unless absolutely necessary. We also don’t have access to operators’ back-end systems, so we have no way of getting this data unless we ask the operator and they agree to share it. This means that we don’t have the ability to deal with routine customer enquiries. If you were to ask us how much money was in your account – we wouldn’t know. If you were to ask us how long it was going to take to unlock your pending bonus – we couldn’t answer. Almost every customer query couldn’t be answered by us. Operators have the information, but we don’t. This would make posting on a forum very difficult. Even if boundaries were clearly defined, some posters would still expect us to be able to answer questions about their accounts. An operator’s brand is also very important to them. We have a selection of brands from around the world – well-known international operators, local operators who are focused on a single region, and boutique operators catering to specialist tastes. Each of them has a different style and a different way of interacting with their customers. To put it bluntly, operators don’t want us to mess this up. They don’t want me to go on a forum and promise something they can’t deliver, or be the one apologising for their mistake (or taking credit for their success). Operators want to control the way their brand is exposed to the public, who communicates on their behalf, and what tone that person uses. This would make posting on forums almost impossible, because every operator would have to approve and comment on every post. So to summarise, operators don’t want us to communicate directly with their customers, and even if we were to do so, we wouldn’t have the information available to us to answer even the simplest of queries. Which brings me to the reason for starting this blog. Because we’re not posting in the forums, and because we don’t have two-way communication with players, it’s easy for people to forget that we are human, or to think that the reason we’re not communicating in the common ways is because we don’t care. Well, I do care – very much in fact. I’m a poker player myself, and I truly love the game. I’ve been playing for fifteen years and I’ve worked in the industry for the last nine. I’ve even written a book about poker strategy. Along with my colleagues here at the MPN, I want to change the game of poker for the better. This blog is our way of sharing the team’s thoughts and ideas with the poker community. It may be one-way communication, but surely that’s better than no communication at all. With any luck, this blog will generate some discussion, and that will help us to improve our product and the game offering that we offer to operators’ customers. If you like to post in the forums, that’s great. We’re watching and listening, and we read all the feedback we can. In fact, if you raise an interesting topic, maybe we’ll talk about it here on this blog someday. Thank you for reading. --- # Design Portfolio – One Click Colour Coding URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/16/design-portfolio-one-click-colour-coding/ Published: 16 November 2012 One-Click Colour Coding Full Tilt Poker Q2 2011 Almost all online poker sites allow you to take notes on your opponents, so you can remember how they play from session to session. Along with the Ongame network, Full Tilt Poker was one of the first poker sites to offer a category selection feature (in the form of colours) that allowed you to quickly get a feel for the opponents you were facing. The system worked from a modeless pop-up accessed via the right-click menu of your opponent, and required at least three clicks in total – one to open the dialog, another to select the colour from a drop-down menu, and a further click to save and exit. Over time it became very common for players to simply categorise players without making an accompanying text note, so we decided to improve the user experience by making it possible to easily colour code a player without needing the pop-up dialog. My idea was to place all of the colours in a grid within the right-click menu itself, meaning that only a single click of the mouse was required to select a category for your opponent. This simple solution had virtually no risk and yet improved the user experience dramatically for those who regularly colour-code their opponents. More Information: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker/software/new-features Back to Index --- # Design Portfolio – Edge Loyalty Program URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/16/design-portfolio-edge-loyalty-program/ Published: 16 November 2012 ‘Edge’ Loyalty Program Full Tilt Poker Q4 2011 to Q2 2012 One of the first things that I wanted to accomplish after I joined the Full Tilt Poker team in February 2011 was to revamp and simplify the loyalty schemes that the company offered to its players. When I joined, the loyalty program consisted of several diverse elements that had evolved over time, and were somewhat fragmented and distinct from each other. The existing scheme consisted of: - The Iron Man Challenge, which rewarded players for playing on a regular basis. Unlike many other promotions, Iron Man didn’t simply focus on high-volume play, but also rewarded players for coming back to the site frequently, even if they only played a little. - Rakeback, which was a form of cashback promotion, with the amount of rakeback generally set at 27% of the net revenue generated by the player. Rakeback was enormously complex because of the non-transparent way in which revenue was calculated (with a complicated rake attribution mechanism and numerous deductions from the gross revenue). It was impossible for a player to reliably estimate their rakeback in advance because of these complications. In addition, rakeback was only given to players who had joined the site through certain affiliates, meaning that the majority of players did not have access to it. Rakeback was also the root cause of some common security problems. - Full Tilt Points (FTPs), which were a reward that players could spend on various items in a loyalty store. - Black Card, a relatively new promotion that rewarded very high-volume players with bonus points and other benefits, based on the number of FTPs they earned during a rolling 100-day period. I felt that the many separate elements made the overall rewards scheme difficult to understand and advocated switching to a unified system based on rolling averages, like Black Card. As we were planning to relaunch the Full Tilt Poker brand under the new ownership of Groupe Bernard Tapie in late 2011, we had a unique opportunity to change the rewards system, and so we began to design a unified system based around extending Black Card downwards. The system had to compete effectively against our anticipated closest competitors. We identified several weaknesses in competing loyalty programs and aimed to address them in our own. The competing programs had several traps for players which could cause them to lose out on value – a common trap being that the system was based on calendar months and years, meaning that if you started playing late in the month or year it was much harder to qualify for a VIP status than it was if you started early. Since the majority of people are paid in the last week of the month and this is when most deposits are made, this meant that many players felt disenfranchised by such programs. We decided to base our own system around the rolling periods, which had worked well for Black Card and avoided this problem. Another common trap in competing programs is that in order to get any cash for your play, you must spend the points you have earned through playing on cash rewards in the VIP store. If you spend your points on the ‘wrong’ items, you get significantly less cash value than you would otherwise. We decided to avoid this issue in our own program, by not requiring players to spend points in the store to get their cash rewards. Our new system was divided into several tiers. To keep the nice aspect of Iron Man, where you could qualify by playing little and often or by playing a lot but less often, you could qualify for each tier in the new program by maintaining an average level of play over 7, 30, or 100 days. Once you reached the appropriate tier, you would begin earning a cash reward which would be paid on a weekly basis – much like rakeback, except available to all players and without any deductions. The size of the cash reward varied depending on how much you played and your tier within the program, and you could track it in real time in the client as it accumulated. We were the first poker site to allow the player to choose the day of the week on which their weekly reward was paid, and the first to provide detailed tools allowing the player to measure their past level of play, and make projections about what level they would reach in the future. My working title ‘Edge’ (which is a synonym for ‘advantage’ in poker terminology) was selected as the name for the program, with ‘Edge Reward’ becoming the name for the weekly cashback reward. With Edge, we were actually able to increase the rewards on offer (the highest tier offered cashback of 25% of gross revenue plus FTPs, which was significantly higher than the 27% of net revenue offered previously) while simultaneously making cash rewards available to all players, and not just a select few. I’m very proud of the product that Edge became – we made very few compromises to bring it to market*, and in my opinion it improved significantly on the existing Iron Man and rakeback systems while also competing effectively against the other loyalty programs in the marketplace. More information: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/edge *Some minor changes were made to Edge after my departure Full Tilt Poker was acquired by the Rational Group, but for reasons of confidentiality they cannot be discussed here. Back to Index --- # Design Portfolio – Robocap (Dynamic Table Limits) URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/15/design-portfolio-robocap-dynamic-table-limits/ Published: 15 November 2012 Robocap (Dynamic Table Limits) PokerStars Q1 2010 In a live poker game, you can usually only play at one table at any given time for reasons that should be evident. However, online there is no such restriction. You can play two, four, eight or even twenty-four tables at the same time if you wish. In fact it is fairly common for players on sites like PokerStars to ‘multi-table’ – on average, 10% of active unique players are playing 2 or more tables at any given time. This has obvious benefits for both the operator and the player (as long as the player is a winner). However, early on in my time at PokerStars it became obvious that multi-tabling would be a driving force behind many of the usability improvements and new features that I would design, because of one unavoidable fact – multi-tabling is hard! The 10% of players who are multi-tablers slow down the games for the 90% of players who play only one table, making the game less fun. This is not to say that every person who multi-tables significantly slows down the game The severity of the problem was highlighted by a comparison that I performed between PokerStars (which limited players to a maximum of 24 tables by default) and it’s nearest rival Full Tilt Poker (which limited players to a maximum of 8 tables by default, with this increased to 16 on request). For standard No Limit Hold’em full-ring games, Full Tilt Poker dealt 33% more hands per hour, despite the fact that more players saw the flop on average (meaning that more events occurred per hand). In fact, a ‘normal’ speed table on Full Tilt Poker dealt slightly more hands per hour than a ‘fast’ speed table on PokerStars. This was a startling statistic which needed to be explained. Some of the discrepancy could be explained by differences in software. For example, Full Tilt Poker allowed players less time to act, and had faster card-dealing animation. Accordingly, during my time at PokerStars I designed a number of changes to the software to speed up the games (and these were continued by my successors after I left). But clearly differences in software alone could not account for such a major variation in game speed – nor could they explain the many complaints that we would receive from recreational players who wanted to introduce games where multi-tablers weren’t allowed, because of slow play. The answer was rooted in the Peter Principle. Multi-tablers typically push themselves too far, increasing the number of tables they are playing until they are playing more than they could really handle. Once somebody feels comfortable at, say 8 tables, it is very difficult to convince them that they should play fewer. Often they won’t realise that they are slowing the game down, and even if they do, human selfishness means that they are unlikely to give up the possibility of extra profit or rewards and cut back on their tables to improve the experience of others. On the other hand, there were a few multi-tablers who were able to play 24 tables without causing delays, and were capable of playing even more, but were limited to a maximum of 24. The problem was that the existing 24-table limit was fixed in stone, and bore no relation whatsoever to how capable a multi-tabler a person actually was. People are different – one player might struggle to play 4 tables without slowing the game, while another can play 24 tables easily without causing a significant delay. The only real solution, therefore, is to have a table cap that is different for each player, and which takes into account how capable the player is of multi-tabling without causing delays. It turns out that the average time it takes for a player to respond (to take an action when it is their turn) is about 4.5 seconds. Clearly, if somebody can maintain that speed or better while playing at 24 tables, they should be allowed to play more. However, if somebody is exceeding that time by a significant margin on a regular basis, chances are that they are playing more tables than they can really handle and their table cap should be reduced so that they don’t make the game an unpleasant experience for their opponents. Because nothing like this had been done before in online poker, I designed a configurable rules-based system. Administrators could define a rule like ‘If a player’s action time is greater than 11000 milliseconds, and they are playing at 10 or more tables, and their existing cap is 10 or higher, then decrease their table cap by 2’. This allowed the company to roll out the system gradually and silently so that they could see the effect that the changes would have in advance of them actually being implemented. Dynamic Table Limits were rolled out at PokerStars after I left the company in July 2010, and at the time of writing it appears that they are being used quite conservatively (understandable, since some players are not going to like having their table limits reduced). However I expect the system to have a major positive impact on the quality and speed of ring games online in the coming years. More Information: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/features/playing-speed/ Back to Index --- # Design Portfolio – Sit & Go Registration Improvements URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/13/design-portfolio-sit-go-registration-improvements/ Published: 13 November 2012 Sit & Go Registration Improvements PokerStars Q1-Q2 2008 A common problem that occurred on PokerStars in 2008 was that you would try to enter a tournament that had a maximum number of entrants (for example, a Sit & Go with a maximum of 9 players), but by the time you had completed the registration process, the tournament had filled up and started, so your registration failed. This was very frustrating for customers who were interested in tournaments that filled very quickly, such as low-stakes or play money STTs. To counter this problem, I designed a feature whereby the player was offered the opportunity to register in the next available identical event if the tournament had filled up by the time they completed their registration. This allowed the customer to register for a game on the first attempt every time, a huge improvement to usability. More Information: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/features/software-news/previous-years/#sfn6 Back to Index --- # Design Portfolio – Text Filtering URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/01/design-portfolio-text-filtering/ Published: 1 November 2012 Text Filtering PokerStars Q2 2008 PokerStars Tournament Filter with Text Filter at the Top It’s mid-2008. PokerStars is well-known for its wide selection of tournaments. In fact, there are now thousands of different tournaments every single day, and it is becoming difficult to easily find the ones that interest you in amongst the rabble of tournaments that don’t. The simplest way to find the week’s flagship event is to scroll through the list of ‘Special’ tournaments, looking out for an entry with the name ‘Sunday Million’. At the time, PokerStars already had a basic filtering system in place so that users could hide specific games they weren’t interested in. For example, to hide Omaha games the user could uncheck the box marked ‘Omaha’, and users could check another box so that only tournaments that were currently registering or upcoming were shown. But with thousands of upcoming tournaments at any one time, this was of limited use. While designing the upgraded filter, I made obvious improvements such as allowing the user to filter out specific game formats that didn’t interest them (like Turbo tournaments), and some less obvious ones like preventing the player from being able to enter filtering combinations which would have always returned no results. But possibly the biggest lightbulb moment came as a result of playing around with Windows Vista’s search feature. In Windows Vista, the start menu has an integrated search function. You can open the start menu and start typing, and results are shown in real time as you press each key. Microsoft has improved this further in Windows 7 and 8, to the point where you can now open a program or file with as little as three key strokes (for example, opening Word is as simple as pressing the Windows key, followed by ‘W’ and then Enter). Many tournaments on PokerStars, including all of the flagship events, have names. I realised that with a similar type of search mechanism to Windows Vista, you could find a specific tournament like the Sunday Million with trivial ease. All you’d have to do is start typing the word ‘Sunday’, and voilà, there was your tournament. With the addition of a boolean NOT to remove keywords that you were not interested in, this became a very powerful feature. More information: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/features/sorting/ Back to Index --- # Design Portfolio – Index of Features URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/11/01/design-portfolio-index-of-features/ Published: 1 November 2012 ## Introduction This is the index for a series of posts which will come together to form a portfolio of the features I have worked on over the course of my career in software design. In my time in the industry, I have led the development of new software features at PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, the two largest poker rooms in the world. The features I have designed reach an audience of hundreds of thousands of unique customers every day. Although I’ve been designing and programming games my whole life (starting with text-based adventure games in BASIC and then side-scrolling platform games in Klik & Play and The Games Factory as a kid), I fell into designing features for PokerStars by accident. I’d shown an interest in new software features and had experience in interaction design from University, so I was given the opportunity to design a number of small features – which eventually developed into a career. Over the course of my career I have worked on hundreds of software features for PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and others. However, for some of these features I simply led the design team. I’m only including features in this index if I conceived the idea myself, or was substantially involved the design and/or implementation of the product. One final note – due to the unfortunate events of 2011, many of the features that I conceived and designed at Full Tilt Poker have not yet been released. To preserve the confidentiality of these projects they will not be included here until they are publicly announced. ## Features I Conceived and Designed The following features were my own original creations: - Several not-yet-released features – Full Tilt Poker –  Q1 2011 to Q3 2012 - One-Click Colour Coding – Full Tilt Poker – Q2 2011 - Robocap (Dynamic Player Table Limits) – PokerStars – Q1 2010 - Sit & Go Registration Improvements – PokerStars – Q1 to Q2 2008 - Text Filtering – PokerStars – Q2 2008 ## Features I Designed The following features were designed by me: - Several not-yet-released features – Full Tilt Poker – Q1 2011 to Q3 2012 - ‘Edge’ Loyalty Program – Full Tilt Poker –  Q4 2011 to Q2 2012 - Double and Triple Chance Tournaments – Full Tilt Poker – Q1 2011 - Cap Tables – PokerStars – Q2 2010 to Q3 2011 - Detached Chat – PokerStars – Q3 2009 to Q3 2010  - Synchronised Tournament Breaks – PokerStars – Q3 2009 - Game Speed Improvements – PokerStars – Q3 2009 - Notes Improvements (Colour Coding and Visibility) – PokerStars – Q3 2009 - Show Hole Cards When All-In Option (Ring Games) – PokerStars – Q2 2009 - Sit & Go Rematch – PokerStars – Q2 2009 - Auto Add-On (Tournaments) – PokerStars – Q2 2009 - Milestone Hands Countdown – PokerStars – Q1 2009 - Team Pro Visibility – PokerStars – Q4 2008 to Q3 2009 - Bounty Tournaments – PokerStars – Q4 2008 to Q3 2009 - Multi-Currency Accounts and Games – PokerStars – Q4 2008 to Q1 2010 - Datamining Control – PokerStars – Q4 2008 - Auto Rebuy and Add-On (Ring Games) – PokerStars – Q3 2008 - Fold and Show – PokerStars – Q2 2008 to Q3 2011 - Time Zone Support – PokerStars – Q2 2008 - Ring Game Highlighting – PokerStars – Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 - Black Lobby Theme – PokerStars – Q4 2007 to Q1 2008 --- # Proactive Responsible Gaming URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/07/06/proactive-responsible-gaming/ Published: 6 July 2012 I recently read an article in another magazine by Simon Burridge, the CEO of Virgin Games. In the article, Burridge laments the fact that gambling businesses are often perceived by the public and portrayed by the media to be dirty and evil, despite the fact that the gambling industry has much tighter controls than other ‘vice industries’, such as the alcohol and the tobacco businesses. For example, you can self-exclude yourself from a chain of bookmakers if you are a problem gambler, but can you self-exclude yourself from purchasing alcohol at Tesco if you’re a problem drinker? Burridge also argues that the National Lottery is unfairly perceived as more reputable than other types of gambling (especially casino games), and doesn’t have the same stigma attached, despite the fact that it is available to children as young as 16, from a diverse range of outlets, with no control to prevent problem gamblers from taking part. There is a difficult truth to gambling and other so-called ‘vice industries’ however. Any business, be they a clothes retailer, an eBay seller or a car dealership, wants loyalty and repeat business. The easiest way to assure repeat business is to have a product that your customers can become addicted to – which is something that the alcohol, tobacco and gambling industries have – but of course the social consequences of addiction are extremely severe. What is unique to the ‘vice industries’ is that we must find a way to retain customers and ensure repeat business withoutcausing addiction. While I strongly agree with Burridge that the gambling industry’s controls are significantly stronger than those of alcohol and tobacco, and that the public’s perception is extremely unfair, I also believe that there is more that we can do, and that frankly the responsible gaming systems of even the best operators today are still only in their infancy. Today’s responsible gaming methods are mostly retroactive, which is probably because online gaming operators have a difficult quandary to resolve – on the one hand, we must not accidentally exclude good customers with responsible gambling habits; but on the other hand, we must be seen to give problem gamblers help and the tools to control themselves.  The problem with retroactive methods is that the player is already experiencing a problem by the time they are exposed to the controls. For example, by the time a player reaches their deposit limit or table limit, they have probably already lost a sum of money which would be considered highly significant to most people; and using the self-exclusion tools requires a player to first admit that they have a problem and should take a break from the games. What I’m going to suggest is not an expansion of retroactive methods (although, as I have argued for security purposes, I believe that competing companies should work together to share a blacklist of self-excluded players), but the introduction of proactive methods that would allow us to detect the signs of problem gambling before the player caused themselves significant harm. In the online sector we are uniquely positioned to do this as we have access to a wealth of information about a player’s financial and playing habits, and can easily process this data en masse. The benefits to detecting a problem gambler early are obvious. First and foremost, protecting players who are at risk is simply the right thing to do. By stopping somebody early, you might prevent them from harming themselves or others, and you might be able to offer them help and advice that will help them to control their addiction. If nothing else, this should help you sleep at night. Stopping problem gambling early also helps safeguard the reputation of your brand, and the entire industry, in particular by guarding against the type of media stories that we see all the time in the Daily Mail, of people who destroyed their families by running up gambling debts that they couldn’t afford. Another less obvious benefit to detecting a problem gambler early is that you can guard against fraud and chargebacks. Problem gamblers are much more likely to chargeback on transactions as their losses inevitably mount, and are also more likely to attempt to use credit cards belonging to other people to finance their addiction. Detecting a problem gambler early ideally allows you to prevent such issues in the first place, but at the very least allows you to implement greater security controls and perform KYC checks in advance of any problems rather than cleaning up afterwards. But how do you detect problem gambling proactively, without negatively impacting players who are able to gamble responsibly? Simple – you look for the tell-tale signs. Gamblers Anonymous famously has a list of ‘twenty questions’, to which problem gamblers are expected to answer positively to at least seven. This isn’t a 100% scientific method of determining whether somebody has a problem, but simply something predictive, built on years of experience. The questions are: 1                     Do you lose time from work due to gambling? 2                     Is gambling making your home life unhappy? 3                     Is gambling affecting your reputation?                           4                     Have you ever felt remorse after gambling? 5                     Do you ever gamble to get money with which to pay debts or otherwise solve financial difficulties? 6                     Does gambling cause a decrease in your ambition or efficiency?                        7                     After losing, do you feel you must return as soon as possible and win back your losses? 8                     After a win do you have a strong urge to return and win more?         9                     Do you often gamble until your last pound is gone? 10                 Do you ever borrow to finance your gambling? 11                 Have you ever sold anything to finance gambling? 12                 Are you reluctant to use gambling money for normal expenditure?                 13                 Does gambling make you careless of the welfare of your family?                       14                 Do you gamble longer than you planned? 15                 Do you ever gamble to escape worry or trouble? 16                 Have you ever committed, or considered committing an illegal act to finance gambling? 17                 Does gambling cause you difficulty in sleeping ? 18                 Do arguments, disappointments or frustrations create an urge within you to gamble? 19                 Do you have an urge to celebrate any good fortune with a few hours gambling?        20                 Have you ever considered self – destruction as a result of your gambling? These questions can give us clues as to the type of behaviours to look for. The fact that the list contains 20 questions, of which problem gamblers are expected to answer with 7 or more with ‘yes’, also suggests that detecting only one type of behaviour probably isn’t enough. Instead, as with the detection of collusion, bot use, and other types of unethical play, detecting problem gambling is best done by automatically searching for multiple types of behaviour, scoring each one, and then flagging the highest-scoring accounts for manual investigation and follow up by a trained professional. The types of behaviour to look out for might include: ·        Unhealthy Session Times: The Gamblers Anonymous questions suggest that playing during working hours (question 1) or playing when you should be sleeping (question 17) are signs of problem gambling. A simple way to detect this would be to look for players who are playing during the typical working or sleeping hours in the country that they are based in. For example, in the United Kingdom, a player who plays at 3pm on a Monday afternoon will typically be playing in working hours, and a player who plays at 2am on a Thursday morning will be playing in normal sleeping hours. These types of session, when combined with other factors, could be indicative of problem gambling. ·         Unhealthy Session Length: A player who plays excessively long sessions is clearly not playing responsibly, and Gamblers Anonymous suggest that gambling longer than planned (question 14) is a sign of problem gambling. So scoring a player progressively based on the length of their session (i.e. a 14-hour session scores higher than a 12-hour session) could be a good way to identify unhealthy playing habits. ·         Destructive Playing Habits: The Gamblers Anonymous questions identify several types of destructive playing habits. For example, a player who plays until their account is empty is effectively answering ‘yes’ to question 9. A player who loses all their money and then immediately deposits to try and win it back, or who chases their losses by moving up in stakes, is answering ‘yes’ to question 7. Even moving up in stakes after a big win could be indicative of a problem. ·         History of Self-Exclusion: A player who has a history of excluding themselves or imposing betting limits may be experiencing remorse over their gambling (question 4 of the Gamblers Anonymous questions). Such a person may suspect that they have a problem but be having difficulty controlling it – something which they could use your help with. ·         Indicative Chat: As any experienced operator will know, players make some very extreme admissions in the chat – everything from suicide threats, to sexual fantasies, to gambling problems. Monitoring the chat for certain key words and phrases associated with an unhappy home life (question 2), remorse (question 4), or problem gambling generally could help to identify players who are having difficulties. ·         Financial Habits: Monitoring the financial habits of your players can help you to detect tell-tale signs that something might be wrong. A player with a history of chargebacks is more likely than usual to be a problem gambler. A player with a large number of failed deposits, or any attempts to deposit with a card belonging to another person, could be indicative that a player is turning to fraud to fund their habit (question 16). Similarly, receiving a large number of inbound transfers from other players could indicate that the player is borrowing money from friends to finance their gambling (question 10). As should be obvious, few of these factors are strong indicators of problem gambling when seen in isolation. For example, a player receiving lots of inbound transfers could simply be being staked, and a player who plays at 3pm in the afternoon could simply be unemployed, retired, or a professional gambler. However, in combination with each other, these indicators can add up to make a convincing case. It can’t hurt to call a player on the phone if they are showing some of the signs of an impending problem, and check that everything is alright. If doing so prevents even one player from experiencing the nightmare of a fully-fledged gambling addiction, it would be worth it. --- # Underachievers, Please Try Harder URL: https://scott.co.im/2012/02/20/underachievers-please-try-harder/ Published: 20 February 2012 The past year has been an annus horribilis for the online gaming world, with the actions of the United States Department of Justice acting as a catalyst to the downfall of some of its biggest brands, millions of dollars of player funds remaining in perdition, and an ever rising mistrust for the businesses that comprise the online poker industry. But it has also been an unprecedented opportunity for smaller online poker rooms to break out and make themselves a big success – with the goliaths like PokerStars and Full Tilt handicapped by Black Friday and it’s repercussions, there hasn’t been a market as ready for the taking since 2006. Despite this opportunity, not much has changed and the top spots remain in roughly the same order. PokerStars remains the giant it has been for the past five years, and is distantly followed by the Party Poker and iPoker platforms, fighting over the runner-up spot. Much has been written over the past year about what made PokerStars and Full Tilt the dominant players in the market.  There has been a tendency among some to cite unfair competition – the fact that these sites could remain in the US, literally rake in the cash, and then utilise that money to finance their expansion into Europe. The publicly listed operators in particular seem to constantly blaming the ‘US-facing’ sites for their woes, with the CFO of bwin.party, Martin Weigold, going so far as to remark that they needed to see PokerStars ‘shutting down’ before they would benefit from the events of the past year. However – is this really all about money? After all, it’s not like bwin.party is short on cash – this is the company which was valued in 2011 at over $2 billion USD, which has some of the strongest brands in the market (think PartyPoker and the World Poker Tour), and which has several revenue streams like casino and bingo which a company like PokerStars doesn’t have. Perhaps it’s now time to stop making excuses about unfair competition, and instead of analysing what made PokerStars a success, analyse what it is that has caused some of the ‘euro sites’ and networks to underachieve so much. Is it harsh to say that a company like bwin.party is an underachiever in poker? Personally, I don’t think so. In 2006, Party Poker, then the group’s flagship brand, was the biggest online poker site by a significant margin. The site was well-known for its juicy games and generous bonus offers, ensuring it was packed with recreational players and serious players alike. Having just floated on the stock market and raised around a billion pounds for its owners, the company had plenty of money to reinvest and grow the business. Then the UIGEA hit, and Party made the cautious decision to withdraw from the US market, losing the majority of its customers overnight. This was a turning point for the company, and the decision was understandable given that the company was publicly traded and investors had been concerned about US legal intervention even before its IPO. But what weren’t understandable were the company’s actions after the UIGEA. By withdrawing from the US voluntarily, Party left a gap in the market for other operators. At this point, the sensible thing to do would have been to invest in development of the business – either to plug that gap in the USA with an alternative product such as subscription poker or a Zynga-style monetised social game, or to develop the business elsewhere by investing heavily in marketing to emerging markets like Germany and Russia. But Party did neither – instead, they took their now greatly-reduced player base and diversified into new products like casino, bingo and backgammon. Not only did this kill of much of the company’s poker liquidity at a time when poker was its biggest vertical, it reduced the marketing budget that was available to poker. Gradually, the company shifted from being entirely poker-centric to earning less than 30% of its revenue from poker in 2010. To single out bwin.party would be unfair, however. There are plenty of similar companies out there, many of them also publicly traded, that have failed to capitalise on the opportunities available to them post Black Friday and in general. But what do these companies have in common that has caused them to underachieve? First could be the tendency for these companies to undervalue poker expertise. I’ve written about this subject before for InsidePokerBusiness, and I feel strongly that in order to succeed in the online poker business, your company needs to recruit people who are passionate about the game and teach them to be businesspeople (if necessary), rather than taking businesspeople and teaching them poker. Ideally, a poker company would have a mix of highly passionate and knowledgeable poker enthusiasts, and experienced businesspeople – this type of culture ensures that both types of employee have something to learn from the other. However, the underachievers prefer to spend their money on hiring transient CEOs and non-executive directors, and place too much emphasis on experience in business and not enough on passion and knowledge of the product. It seems almost inconceivable that you would hire a head chef who didn’t enjoy food, or a bank teller who couldn’t count, but the underachievers will happily place somebody who has never played a hand of poker in the most senior of roles. Another possible cause could be a tendency to underinvest in software. A clear example of this has emerged after the closure of Full Tilt Poker on June 29th – which took with it the popular Rush Poker product. At the time of writing (February 2012) Full Tilt has been closed for eight months and the only competitor that has announced it is developing a competing product is… wait for it… PokerStars! How the underachievers could miss such a major opportunity is beyond me*. But the biggest and most fundamental mistake the underachievers make is failing to realise that at its core, poker is a game of liquidity. If you have two players, you can have only one game running. But if you have three players, you can have three games running – Player 1 vs Player 2, Player 1 vs Player 3, and Player 2 vs Player 3 – you’ve increased the number of players by 50%, but liquidity by 300%. With one thousand players, you have upwards of 20,000 potential games (assuming there are reasonable restrictions in place as to the number of tables each player can play at once). Each active player that you add to the ecosystem has a disproportionately positive effect on the number of potential games, especially if your site is small. Therefore, it’s a big mistake to hurt this liquidity by spreading it across too many stakes, currencies, and products – but this is something the underachievers all do in spades, especially by chasing the easy money in casino and bingo. It’s also a mistake to undervalue your serious, winning players – as these are the players that are most likely to start games and build your liquidity. The recent trend towards penalising winning players amongst the underachievers is likely to hurt them more than it helps. This is not a rant – it’s a call to action at a time when the online poker industry needs an injection of competition and innovation to prevent it from becoming stagnant. It’s time to stop making excuses and face up to facts – has your company been an underachiever? If so, get out there and make a change. This article originally appeared in InsidePokerBusiness, Jan-Feb 2012.  *After this article was published, bwin.Party, iPoker and Microgaming all announced their own versions of Rush Poker with various different names. --- # Transparency URL: https://scott.co.im/2011/12/09/transparency/ Published: 9 December 2011 For months now, we’ve been hearing about the effects of Black Friday on the industry and how it supposedly levelled the playing field for operators who exited the US Market post-UIGEA. However, there’s one major issue that was brought to the forefront on Black Friday which has hardly been discussed in the media, which is surprising since it benefits the operators who left the US market the most. That issue is transparency. Before April 15th 2010, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker were highly regarded among players as two of the most trustworthy operators – companies who would ‘put things right’ if things went wrong, who you could trust with your money, and who were accountable to governments and reputable regulators if the worst happened. But then Black Friday arrived, and shone a light on the extraordinarily complex web of companies that comprised PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and the Cereus network, with the DOJ indictments naming businesses throughout the world that players never knew existed, and listing bank accounts in more countries still. But the DOJ indictments barely scratched the surface. According to a court decision in early 2011, the PokerStars group consisted of at least 23 separate companies throughout the world, providing a variety of services including poker training, treasury management, live event sponsorship, and marketing. Furthermore, since Black Friday players themselves and popular poker blogs such as Subject:Poker have uncovered the complex corporate structure of Full Tilt Poker and the many faraway companies involved. Online poker businesses have this complex corporate structure because it allows them to have their cake and eat it too. If you were building your perfect poker site from scratch, you might put your HQ in the Isle of Man (so you can take advantage of the respected licensing regime and 0% corporation tax), your marketing company in London (where marketing and TV production talent is easily available) your software development company in Dublin (which is rich in IT talent due to its high concentration of technology companies, and also has low corporation tax) and your treasury company in Switzerland or on an island somewhere in the Caribbean where nasty lawyers and taxmen can’t get to it. Maybe you’d start up a few additional companies to get licences in Europe, or in different time zones so you can provide 24-hour support. Oh, and you’ll need a holding company or three for all of those, obviously. You can see how the massive corporate giant builds! Having a structure like this allows you to get the best of everything – you can be as tax efficient as possible by putting your big money-making companies in the most tax-friendly jurisdictions, while still being able to employ the best staff by not forcing them to move to inconvenient locations in the Mediterranean. This sort of structure makes sense to accountants and lawyers (and frankly, I’m surprised that more online poker companies don’t have similar structures) but, to a player looking in from the outside, it looks suspicious. Many players find it difficult to trust online poker companies at the best of times, but when they find out that they’re not actually dealing with the brand directly but one of a myriad of confusingly-named subsidiaries, their level of trust plummets still further. First and foremost, players want online poker sites to be accountable. If I go into Tesco to buy milk and get charged for a trolley load of things I didn’t buy, I know that if all else fails I can go to Tesco PLC to complain. If I buy a television from Amazon.com and it’s never delivered, I know that if I can’t work things out with their support team or my bank, I can complain to Amazon EU SARL. If my case is really serious and I’ve exhausted every other avenue, I can even sue one of these companies. But with online poker companies, that’s not always the case. It’s not necessarily clear which of the many companies you’re actually doing business with, what country that company is based in, and what they are responsible for. Players can feel powerless if they have a trivial support problem, let alone if they have a serious dispute over a significant amount of money. Starting with the poker site’s regulator (if they have one) is a good beginning – but what if you don’t know how to contact that regulator – or what if you don’t speak the language of the country where they are based? That feeling of powerlessness is extremely frustrating, and sites can do a lot to ease it by being transparent about who the player is dealing with and where they can go if they have a dispute. But it’s not just powerlessness. When something goes wrong for an online poker company, often that company will shut down all communication for fear of saying the wrong thing. If the company does speak, it’s through lawyers or sponsored professionals – or the communication is written in such a guarded, corporate way as to sound more like a press release than something that really addresses the issues. Even in the best of times, online poker sites often communicate with their customers through anonymous media like internet forums or Twitter, using pseudonyms and not real names. Pseudonyms, screen names and anonymity do not go hand in hand with transparency and accountability. Players want to deal with a real person – a public face of the company, and will forgive and even empathise a lot easier when they see a fallible human being is at the reigns. Somebody who knows what they are talking about, who has the power to solve any issues they might have, and who doesn’t patronise them with corporate bullshit. A sponsored pro isn’t enough here – it has to be somebody who has real power to change things, and who can get them done without going through endless layers of approval. Frankly, I’d rather have Jeremy Clarkson fronting my poker site than some anonymous, corporate, trying-to-please everyone shill – because love him or hate him, most people respect honesty and straightforwardness more than they do spin and buzzwords. So why is this so rare? Public companies like bwin.Party and 888 should be making a big deal out of the fact that their financials are published for all to see and their board of directors are real people with real faces. Their employees have nothing to hide and should be proud to put their real face and name behind their product. But they’re not – and really the only person who has got this right in the past is Lee Jones when representing PokerStars and the Cake Poker Network. Jones was able to build a real rapport with players over the years, and despite the fact that the businesses he’s represented have had the occasional scandal, he is still highly regarded and his reputation is intact. In the post-Black Friday era, all online poker operators are going to come under more scrutiny from players, governments, regulators and the media. Those who are able to do business in a transparent way, who hold themselves accountable for their actions, and who are able to provide a trustworthy public face should have a distinct advantage in this new, ever-more suspicious environment. Will your business be one of them? This article originally appeared in InsidePoker Business, Nov-Dec 2011. --- # Good Software is Sticky URL: https://scott.co.im/2011/10/13/good-software-is-sticky/ Published: 13 October 2011 In the past few months much has been spoken, thought and written about ‘good software’ in the online poker industry. Good software, it has been said, is what made PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker the biggest poker sites in the world. In the last issue of InsidePoker Business, columnist Phil Shaw dedicated an article to the features that made these sites stand out from the crowd. I agree with Phil that good software is one of the most important differentiating factors that an online poker business can have. Good software is ‘sticky’ – it helps you to retain players and builds loyalty, because a great deal of players are reluctant to convert to a competing site which has inferior software, even if other factors such as promotions or bonuses are better. To many players, perhaps even the majority, software is more of a factor in deciding where to play than game integrity and security, which tend to operate in the background with little visibility for the player. But what makes good software and how can you make yours better? Let’s look at an unrelated company which is renowned for producing world-leading software. Apple is extremely topical at the moment, with the release of their latest operating system and smartphone, and the death of one of the company’s founders Steve Jobs. Apple has a reputation for producing some of the most user-friendly software available and has a loyal fan base eager to upgrade to its latest product. You might think that Apple’s software has all of the leading edge features, but actually that’s not the case. Apple’s software is often criticised for lacking some of the functions available on competing devices. For example, Apple is regularly slated for not having support for the Adobe Flash platform on its devices, which competing Android, Blackberry and Windows mobile devices do. In fact, many have predicted that Android’s superior software features would give it an edge that would eventually wipe the iPhone off the map. Apple knows that good software isn’t necessarily about having the most features. It’s about having features that are presented well and that work intuitively, without needing explanation. It’s also about introducing features that people will actually use, not offering endless levels of customisation for a tiny percentage of end-users. Thus, an iPhone just works as you expect. The way you interact with the phone is natural. The interface is consistent across different applications. There are few unnecessary ‘expert’ features, and cool new offerings are packaged together in useful ways. There is a lot for online poker to learn here! In recent years, there has been a tendency for online poker sites to focus on features aimed at advanced users, and to provide those advanced users with very powerful tools to help their game. This might have come about as site representatives have increasingly used player feedback from internet forums and elsewhere to plan their future product development strategy. At first glance this seems like a sensible approach, as advanced users typically generate more revenue per capita than other player demographics. However, in some cases this has come at the cost of developing strong features for the remaining majority of players. The problem with using feedback from any vocal player group is that the players who are giving the feedback usually want you to hand them the money from every other player on a silver platter! In my opinion, this has resulted in a great imbalance, with some online poker providers offering so many advanced features that the user interface is practically incomprehensible. This is particularly the case with smaller poker networks, who are keen to introduce features that will increase revenue immediately. Thus, we’ve seen features like ‘Auto Rebuy’ for ring games, and the ability to manage and play at insurmountable numbers of tables, tacked onto dated software not designed with expansion in mind, with these new additions sitting uncomfortably alongside older features and looking out of place. Some sites seem to be focusing almost exclusively on introducing features to enable people who are already multitabling to do so even more. Perhaps these improvements will enable this tiny minority of players to play 10 tables instead of 8. But let me ask you this – would you rather implement a feature that helped 2% of your players go from playing 8 tables to 10 tables, or would you prefer a feature that helped 90% of your players move from playing one table to two? There is an entire third-party ecosystem built around expert players, with hotkey programs, table managers, and fish finders among many pieces of software designed to provide the niche features that aren’t available in the mainstream. Therefore, your expert customers gain little when you implement a feature which is already available in a piece of third-party software. Most likely, they’ve already paid for it! This focus on the expert user has meant that user interface design and simplicity has suffered greatly. A typical poker table is now covered in checkboxes, banners, pop-ups and buttons, often inconsistent in size, appearance and behaviour. This is one of the places where we can learn from Apple. Apple keeps the number of ways that a user can interact with its interface to a minimum – if an option can be either off or on, then a toggle switch is shown, and never anything else. Once the user has worked out how to use this one switch, they then know how to use every similar option in the software.  Think about how you can make the look and feel of your software consistent across the entire product. From the beginning of your customer’s interaction with your business online, the behaviour of key features should be the same so that by the time your customer is signing up for an account and playing in the games, they already know how your software will behave. A user shouldn’t be faced with a steep learning curve every time you present them with a dialog – they should already know how to use it, because they’ve interacted with similar dialogs before. If you use a checkbox to turn something off and on somewhere in your software, every similar option should also be a checkbox – and not a mixture of radio buttons, menu selections and toggles. Another thing that Apple regularly does is to hide options which are unnecessary or irrelevant. Turn an option off, and all of its confusing sub-options magically disappear. In addition, Apple products tend not to support legacy features used by a minority of people. This approach can also be extended to poker software – if there is an option that few players ever use, why have it? A good example is the ‘Auto Post Blinds’ checkbox which for some reason is still a staple part of poker software, despite the fact that a huge majority of players check it immediately at the beginning of a session, and never touch it again. This checkbox belongs in the past, along with so many others. Above all, Apple software removes the distractions and focuses the user on the task in hand. We should do the same, and allow the user to focus on the game of poker. After all, that’s why they’re playing. This article originally appeared in InsidePoker Business, Sep-Oct 2011. --- # Continuity of Message URL: https://scott.co.im/2011/06/20/continuity-of-message/ Published: 20 June 2011 Throughout the past few years, businesses in our industry have started to realise that poker has become a truly global game. Even before Black Friday, the USA no longer represented the overwhelming majority of players as it once did, and companies couldn’t rely on the US market alone if they wanted to be successful. Poker companies began to acknowledge the importance of carefully tailoring their product to each market, and as a result, we saw classic poker books from authors like David Sklansky, Dan Harrington and Doyle Brunson being translated into Spanish, German, and French. Online poker sites introduced foreign-language websites, support teams and game software. Magazines and discussion forums sprung up for every market, live poker tours started to flourish in places we never thought possible, and celebrities and pros from many new countries were signed up to represent the game. Localisation of your product is hugely important, and it’s easy to see why – simply look at a company which doesn’t bother to localise it’s product to your country, and see how you feel. Look at the TV advertising from a company such as IBM or Chevrolet for example, who reuse the same advertising and branding concepts in Europe as they do in the USA. When was the last time you bought any product from IBM? Would you even consider buying a car from Chevrolet? The simple fact is that people don’t tend to like products that are too ‘foreign’ unless they evoke a particular image of quality or luxury (such as French perfume or Italian fashion). Companies in many types of industry regularly forget this however, and the results are often disastrous. Take the infamous case of the Coca Cola Company, who attempted to launch their bottled water brand ‘Dasani’ in the UK a few years ago. Dasani is water taken from the mains, and then put through a very advanced purification process before being bottled and sold. Water purified in this way is huge business in the USA, and you can’t walk any Las Vegas poker room without seeing bottles of it on the tray of every cocktail waitress. But Coca Cola didn’t tailor their product to the European market in any way, and the press ran with the story that Dasani was simply ‘bottled tap water’, killing any hope that the product would be successful. It seems that online poker companies have realised that, while poker is a fundamentally American game, you can tailor the product to individual markets like Britain, Russia or Australia and make it even more successful in those regions. But it’s important that the local message you send to those regions persists from the first moment that the customer interacts with your product until the last, and this is something that many operators are getting wrong. One example that never ceases to irritate me is the ‘English only’ rule. This rule states that players must only chat at the tables in the English language. It stems from live poker games, where there are concerns that if two players are speaking in a language that nobody else understands, they could be colluding with each other by sharing their hole cards or cheating in some other way. The rule famously appears in the movie Rounders, where Ed Norton’s character chastises two Russians for speaking ‘Sputnik’ at the table – a term which nicely illustrates why I don’t like the rule. Players who speak a so-called ‘foreign’ language at the tables are typically issued with a written warning for doing so, which might coincide with a temporary chat ban. Such players, who probably haven’t taken the time to read all of a site’s rules, are often completely perplexed by this course of action, and rightly so. Take a German player as an example. This player came to your German .de site after seeing a German advert on German TV. They downloaded the German software, reviewed their game using German hand histories, and may even have dealt with your German support team. But they’re not allowed to chat in German? Why not? This type of action alienates players in markets where poker is growing the most (markets where English is not the first language) in order to satisfy paranoia in markets where online poker is dead or declining. The English-only rule doesn’t do anything to prevent serious collusion – when was the last time you caught a professional collusion ring who were sharing hole cards in the chat? It only helps to dispel the appearance of collusion – but what is more important, appearance or the facts? Another example that I think deserves serious thought is the issue of game currency. Since the birth of online poker, we’ve been using the US Dollar for our cash games and tournaments. This made a lot of sense in 1998 when the only country that really mattered in online poker was the USA. It even made sense in 2006. But does it make sense in mid-2011, now that Black Friday has rewritten the rules for online poker operators, and no major site is accepting US players? Once again, the theoretical German player has interacted with your company from Day 1 as if it were a local company, just as likely to be based in Berlin as in Gibraltar or Dublin. When that German player comes to deposit, chances are they can use their Euro credit card to do so, and they might even be able to keep their account balance in Euro too. But when they go to play in the games, all of a sudden they are required to change their money into US Dollars? The German player has probably never been to the USA, has probably never held a dollar bill before, and has probably never looked at the conversion rates from US Dollars to Euro. Yet you’re forcing this player to make this leap – and for no good reason, since players from countries that actually use the US Dollar aren’t allowed to play anyway! Of course, the currency issue isn’t that simple. Every good Poker Room Manager knows that the more games you spread, the more you run the risk of fragmenting the player base and actually decreasing game stability, along with the number of hands dealt and revenue generated. But isn’t it worth at least trying different approaches to this issue, instead of adopting the ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ attitude? The continuity of your message to players in regional markets is damaged when you tell them that they can’t do what is natural to them – like speaking their own language or playing in their own currency. Each time you put a player in such an unnatural position, there is a chance that they might leave to play elsewhere, or not to play at all. These rules and policies are in place simply because of the history of the marketplace, and because nobody has thought to rethink them. It will be a shrewd poker operator that is the first to get these things right, and provide a continuous message to players regardless of which part of planet Earth those players are from, and what language they speak. Will it be your company? This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Jul-Aug 2011. --- # Gold Farming URL: https://scott.co.im/2011/01/14/gold-farming/ Published: 14 January 2011 The online poker industry, and the poker-playing public, is at war with bots – that is, computer software that plays poker without human intervention. At first glance, this is a somewhat illogical position. After all, playing without human intervention is not necessarily cheating, because a poker bot plays by the same rules as everybody else. A typical bot doesn’t collude, abuse other players in the chat, or multi-account, but it does keep games running and generates revenue. What’s more, a typical bot is extremely predictable and should therefore be simple for a skilled player to beat. If you didn’t know much about poker, you might think that a bot would be exactly the kind of player that the public would like to play against and that poker businesses would want as a customer. However, the vast majority of the poker playing public does not want to play against bots. This is partly due to an irrational fear of bots brought on by the success of computer programs at playing chess (IBM’s Deep Blue computer) and backgammon (Snowie), which has led players to believe that sophisticated poker bots are going to win their money by playing perfect, unexploitable poker. As a result every top poker site prohibits bots, not because they are against the rules of the game, but to protect their reputation. But there is another, more philosophical reason not to allow bots. Some bots are designed by computer programmers as a sort of intellectual challenge – the same sort of motivation that drives programmers into hacking or virus creation. Others are used by people who either can’t resist the urge to cheat, or who are looking for the next ‘get rich quick’ scheme. But neither of these types of people is a poker lover, and no bot is a true participant in the game of poker. A bot does not contribute to the growth or popularisation of the game like a human player might. It doesn’t socialise with other players and create a fun environment like a human player might. A bot doesn’t engage in the game beyond simply taking action – it doesn’t enrich the lives of others or create joy. Every bot which breaks even or wins simply drains money and resources from the online poker community without giving anything back. That’s the real reason not to allow them. In 2004, I was approached by a businessman who wanted to create an online poker ‘sweatshop’. He proposed that I would develop a simple strategy for beating the game, and he would then hire workers in India at very low cost to play the game using that strategy, with all of the profits going into the business. He didn’t see this as unethical because the players wouldn’t be colluding with each other, and no bots would be used which were against the Terms and Conditions of most sites. Indeed, what he was proposing was totally within the rules. I declined, and no doubt the businessman went on to find someone else to develop his strategy. This was my first encounter with a ‘gold farm’. The term ‘gold farming’ derives from the popular online role playing game ‘World of Warcraft’, developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The game’s virtual currency, known as ‘gold’, is bought, sold, and traded for real money outside the game. As a result, a similar problem as in online poker arose, with bots designed to play automatically and earn gold which would then be exchanged for real money, and teams of workers in countries like China and India being paid to earn gold from the game. These gold farms could make money because of the extremely low cost of labour and the relatively high price that the in-game currency attracted in the real world. In online poker, a gold farm consists of a group of workers paid to play online poker. Their accounts are funded by their leader, and the workers are paid a salary for the number of hours they put in, with profits going to the leader. Workers don’t need to be poker players, as they can simply follow a strategy from a chart, or from one of the many advisory programs available to assist players as they play. Workers might assemble in an office, or work from home. In recent years, gold farming has attracted some mainstream attention. In 2008 and 2009, a notorious gold farm from China made a lot of money playing Seven Card Stud online. Although no cheating was ever proven, the fallout from the case resulted in a lot of negative publicity, a great deal of suspicion, and much resentment from players. It’s abundantly clear then, that players don’t want to play against gold farms. What’s more, gold farms detract from the game in the exact same way as bots do, by draining money and resources from the community without contributing anything in return. For those reasons, I believe that gold farms should be prohibited. I can understand the industry’s reluctance to do so, however. After all, it’s generally not a good idea to create a rule which you cannot effectively police or enforce, and detection of gold farms is potentially very difficult. Unlike bots, gold farms interact with the games in exactly the same way as a normal player, because there is a human at the controls. The difference between a human gold farmer and a human poker player is small and difficult to detect. Automatically analysing the playing style of players and comparing them against known strategies, which is a technique used by online backgammon providers, could potentially identify those players who follow strategy charts, or use an identical strategy to other players – a potential indicator of a gold farm or a bot. However, this method’s reliability is questionable if used in isolation and expensive to implement. Another alternative is to not spread games that can be played well by following a simple strategy chart. Two obvious examples of such games are short-stacked No Limit Hold’em cash games, and tournaments with very fast betting structures such as Hyper-Turbo Sit & Gos. By not offering such games, you make it harder for gold farms to develop a simple winning strategy. Also worth considering is prohibiting the use of third-party tools which provide advice about what action to take in every situation. It’s one thing for a tool to tell you what the pot odds are, but it shouldn’t be acceptable for a tool to tell a player that they should ‘raise all-in’. Yet such tools exist and are allowed by some sites. Lastly, we can make gold-farming more difficult by placing stricter rules on player-to-player transfers, which are often used to fund the accounts in gold farms, and on the sharing of accounts by multiple players. These are just ideas. It is worth investigating how Blizzard and other developers of online role-playing games deal with the same problem, and of course the best solution will be one that the whole industry adopts together. It’s clear to me that gold farms are just as much of a threat to online poker as bots are, and are just as unwanted by the poker community. It will be a brave but virtuous business who takes a stand against them first. This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Mar-Apr 2011. --- # Security Alliance URL: https://scott.co.im/2010/10/24/security-alliance/ Published: 24 October 2010 All reputable online poker companies employ security staff, both to protect the company’s interests by preventing fraud, and to protect the players’ interests by preventing collusion, multi-accounting and bot use in the games. Good security can save you money, boost player satisfaction and trust, and safeguard your reputation. However, there is a major problem with the current status quo. Say your security team has a major breakthrough, and catches a ring of colluders. It’s a huge case that has taken hundreds, maybe even thousands of man hours to reach a conclusion. As a company, you’ve spent a fortune on developing tools to catch collusion rings like this one and training expert staff to use them. So you confiscate the colluders’ money, and return it to the players. Perhaps you chip in some of your own money to meet any shortfall in the compensation. That’s great. Unfortunately, the colluders don’t go to court to be sentenced. Instead, they simply learn from their mistakes, and move on to one of the many other sites, equipped with a more advanced strategy for avoiding detection. They continue to cause harm to players and to the industry – the only difference is that they are doing it somewhere else. When you go to a shop to buy a DVD, you don’t buy two copies of the same movie. When you go to get your hair cut, you don’t get it done twice by two different hairdressers. When you pay an affiliate commission for sending you a new player, you don’t do it twice. It’s one of the most obvious rules in business – you don’t pay for the same thing more than once. And yet this is what happens in the online poker industry every single day, because you are paying to catch cheats and fraudsters that have already been caught and barred by other operators. In the brick and mortar casino industry, information on cheats and other undesirables is shared amongst operators, either through lists of unwelcome players supplied by the local regulator, or through a commercial service such as that provided by Griffin Investigations (Las Vegas’ famous ‘black book’). It may be that a particular cheat or fraudster has never set foot in your casino before, but using this shared information, you can identify and catch them before they are able to cause any harm. In policing, information on known criminals is shared between different police forces, through organisations such as Interpol. If a criminal commits fraud in the United Kingdom, they can’t simply run to Brazil or Mexico and start over with a clean slate. They’re arrested by the Brazilian or Mexican police as they enter the country and are made to face the music. Over the years, 188 countries have come to realise that they are better off working together in this way. I strongly believe that, like the world’s police forces, we are stronger together, and that we should put aside our differences on security issues. If we share information about known cheats and fraudsters – such as user IDs, IP and MAC addresses, hardware identifiers, suspicious VPNs and colocation servers, geographical trends, as well as the actual cheating techniques used – then we, like casinos in Las Vegas, can catch undesirables before they cause any harm. I am not suggesting that we should build another bureaucracy, but I do feel that an independent security alliance, comprising of expert members from each of the operators that wishes to participate, is the best way to accomplish this goal. The authority can disperse information on new detection techniques, best practice, and information about trends in fraud and other security issues between its members, and can run as a not-for-profit organisation. An independent authority can also provide an escalation point for high profile cases where players feel that they have been treated unfairly, and provide a greater scope for peer review of complex fraud, collusion or bot use scenarios. It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing security as a competitive advantage. After all, if your security is stronger than your competitor’s, then they will tend to lose a greater proportion of their revenue to fraudsters and cheats, which has knock-on effects in how much money they can devote to competing in other areas such as new acquisitions and player retention. Also, a site with poor security doesn’t do its reputation any favours and may lose some more discerning customers as a result. You might also think that because there are so many operators, each with very different numbers of players, that the bigger sites would contribute a disproportionately large amount of information to the security alliance compared to smaller operators. That may be true, however, the amount of quality, useful information is what really counts. Site A may have ten times as many players as Site B, but it would certainly not have ten times as many fraudsters because fraudsters are much more likely to play on multiple sites compared to a typical player. So the information contributed by Site A would not be ten times as useful to the security alliance. Further to this, whatever fraudsters were caught by Site B would be very likely to also target Site A, or have targeted it in the past, simply due to its size. So a healthy compromise is reached, with a single piece of Site A’s information of a lower quality than Site B’s, but Site A providing more information than Site B to redress the balance. I think it’s important to recognise that we are all interconnected and that our actions have a ripple effect throughout the industry. Every poker operator depends on others for a certain amount of its success. When one operator breaks into a brand new market in a previously untapped area of the world, every other operator benefits (though perhaps not as much) from the new surge of interest in that region.  Conversely, when there is a huge scandal in the industry, every operator is damaged, regardless of their involvement. I think we can agree that all poker operators were harmed significantly when the ‘superuser’ scandals affecting the UltimateBet and Absolute Poker brands were publicised. Improving our trustworthiness and each player’s feeling of security is of paramount importance to attracting new players and retaining existing ones. By launching a security alliance, we would send a strong message to cheats and fraudsters that their time was up, and companies that took part would enjoy a significant boost both in PR and in player trust. This wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve worked together as an industry. We’ve worked together on Responsible Gaming issues, through organisations such as GamCare. We’ve worked together on the US legal situation, and on defining regulatory frameworks in emerging markets such as Italy, France and Estonia. So why not work together on security also? We are an industry that deals with colossal amounts of cash, so you never know when it might save you a million dollars or two.  This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, November-December 2010 --- # Poker Expertise URL: https://scott.co.im/2010/10/24/poker-expertise/ Published: 24 October 2010 What is the most important asset that a poker business has? This is a question that many companies have had to think about as the industry of which we are part continues to streamline and consolidate. But I think that some businesses are missing the point and getting the answer to this fundamental question totally wrong. You might say that the most important asset a poker business has is the customers. After all, customers are the source of the business’ revenue and keeping them happy is paramount. If a business loses all of its customers, then there is no business left. In reality a poker business’ customer base is in constant flux as new players sign up and existing players lose their money or get bored and leave. While there are of course customers who play regular long sessions for years on end, such players are the exception rather than the norm and represent only a small portion of the overall player pool. The fact is, while you should obviously try your best to keep your customers happy, if the business makes an unfortunate mistake which upsets a lot of players, those players aren’t necessarily gone forever. It’s possible to win them back, or to gain new customers to replace them. Customers are a very important, but ultimately replaceable asset. Good staff, however, are not so easy to replace, because good ‘poker guys’ are hard to find. Many of the people who are genuine poker experts don’t want to turn an enjoyable hobby into a full-time job, or perhaps they are making a good living from the game already and don’t like the idea of a ‘nine to five life’. Maybe they don’t want to move to one of the industry’s awkward locations, and would prefer to stay close to their family and friends. The poker lifestyle is an intoxicating one and it’s not easy to convince people to leave it. But without poker expertise, a poker business cannot possibly reach its full potential. It’s difficult to make the right strategic decisions for the future of the business if you don’t have anyone on the board that understands the game, and can anticipate the kind of things that players will be looking for in the future. It’s impossible to make good poker room management decisions, such as what kind of ring games to spread, or what a tournament’s pay-out structure should be, or even what new promotions to offer, without a strong understanding of basic poker principles. Consequently, it never fails to distress me when I hear that there are some companies in our industry that discourage their employees from playing poker. I’ve heard of casinos that don’t allow their dealers to play, and online poker providers that don’t allow any of their employees to gamble at all, perhaps because of concerns that this may result in problem gambling or other issues in their workforce. This is utter madness. If you were a wine producer, you wouldn’t expect your employees to be teetotal, despite the obvious risks to productivity that come with alcohol. How on earth can you actively encourage your staff to be ignorant of your product? If you make decisions without poker expertise, then you will make decisions that are not properly thought out because you don’t have all the information that you need. How can you possibly know how your poker room compares to your competitors’ poker room if your staff are not allowed to actually play poker? The truth is you can’t, and this will show in a shoddy product with weak promotions and sub-standard support, and cause your customers to become upset and lose respect for the business. The end result for a company’s reputation and success will be disastrous. Businesses that discourage their employees from playing poker will never be at the top of the poker industry, it’s that simple. In 2010, there have been some key instances where having poker expertise has helped businesses to innovate or respond to a problem quickly. Take the issue of short stacking, for example. Towards the end of 2009 it became clear that this practice, once barely known but now widespread, had changed the way No Limit Hold’em ring games were played online. The resulting dissatisfaction among both professional and recreational players was obvious and acute. The companies with the most poker expertise were able to respond quickly by changing the buy-in structures of the games they offered, and by choosing a new structure that addressed the issue effectively. Companies with less knowledge and expertise took longer to react, chose a new structure that didn’t satisfy players, or worse still, didn’t recognise that changes needed to be made. There is a tendency for poker businesses to undervalue poker experts. It’s easy to see why, as many poker businesses were founded by a small group of enthusiasts who found themselves short on business knowledge as the company grew, and had to hire people with that knowledge in order to keep themselves afloat. However, good businesspeople are much easier to find than poker experts. A good businessperson can come from any other company. If you’re looking to hire a new head of accounting for example, you simply advertise the position, knowing that the person you recruit doesn’t have to have worked in the poker industry in order to do a good job. You might actively choose somebody who had worked at one of the big accounting firms over somebody who had worked for a poker company. There are lots of people out there that have years of experience in business in general and can do a very good job as long as their role is completely isolated from the poker side of the business. Poker experts however come from a very small segment of the population. They are geographically disparate and difficult to recruit. A poker expert is like a diamond – rare and difficult to obtain, but extremely valuable. While many poker experts have little to no experience working in a formal corporate environment, they do have a big upside in that you can take a poker expert and teach them to become a businessperson. The typical poker expert is smart enough to learn the skills they need to succeed, either through formal education or on-the-job learning, and might really thrive with a little encouragement and support. It’s much more difficult to do things the other way around and turn a businessperson into a poker expert – you just can’t expect to be able to instil the kind of passion for poker that is needed to become an expert into somebody with no experience of the game. As a poker business, you should recognise the poker experts within your company, value them as much as they deserve, and provide them with opportunities to develop their career and to grow as businesspeople. After all, it’s easy to turn a bracelet winner into an MBA graduate, but not so easy the other way round. If you don’t provide these opportunities, then you risk losing your expertise, which is the lifeblood of any poker business. A business without that lifeblood has no hope of survival in these times of tough competition. Undervalue your experts at your peril! This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Jan-Feb 2011 ---