Recently, there have been forum discussions about the early days of online poker. And those led to my chatting with some friends about the nascent times of this version of our game. As the stories mounted and we strained to recall details, I thought to myself, “Why in the world has somebody not written the definitive history of the first ten years of online poker?”When you think about it, a written history (of any sort) provides two benefits: first, it is an immediate source of entertainment and education to the reader. But secondly (and perhaps more importantly) it becomes a part of the historical record. Scholars and researchers can go back later and have documentation of a period in history, a person, an event, whatever.
Now, at this point, you might chuckle and say “Well, Lee – it could be argued that you would make a reasonable choice to take on this project.” Actually, I agree. It would be a fun book to write. It would bring back a lot of memories for me, and I would certainly learn a lot from doing the research for it. Unfortunately, my plate is pretty full right now and I simply don’t have time to take this on. Perhaps one day I’ll get to it and if somebody else beats me to it in the meantime, well, I’ll sure look forward to reading that book.
But to get things started, I’ll tell a couple of stories about the “old days” here. At least they’ll now be in my personal archives and when I get around to writing that book…
Why online poker RNGs really are accurate and secure
You can always find people asserting that the random number generators (RNGs) of online poker sites are not accurate. The truth is that these days they are all 100% robust and deal fair and equally distributed decks of cards.
But there was one notable exception: around 1999, Planet Poker published their RNG and deck shuffling algorithms for the whole world to see. This was a laudable move on their part, designed to show how secure and well-constructed their software was. The problem was that:
1. Their shuffling algorithm had fundamental flaws and did not produce a “fair” shuffle, and
2. There was a massive security hole in the RNG algorithm that would (and did) allow a team of programmers to accurately predict all the cards that would be dealt on a particular hand.
The good news is that the people who cracked the Planet Poker shuffle decided to write a paper about it rather than steal thousands of dollars from unsuspecting players. You can read that original paper here:
http://tinyurl.com/planetshuffle
It makes for fascinating reading if you have an interest in cryptography or poker programming. But the bottom line was that this catastrophe shut Planet Poker down for a few days. Just as that happened, Paradise Poker was coming online, and Planet’s trouble allowed Paradise to slingshot past them into the #1 spot in online poker. Planet never really recovered and essentially dropped off the map a few years later.
Of course, all the other poker operators saw this happen and went to great lengths to ensure that their shuffles were fair and secure. So Planet’s loss was the industry’s gain; I honestly have not worried about the quality of online shuffling ever since.
<title>Enter text here.</title>The “offline play”
I’d only heard this phrase recently, but I was definitely familiar with the problem. In the early days of online poker, few people had “high-speed” or “broadband” Internet. That is, almost everybody was dialing into an ISP on a phone modem. These connections were notoriously unreliable, so online sites did what must have seemed like a very clever idea at the time. If a player disconnected during a hand, he would be declared “all-in,” and the hand would be played out as if he were all-in as in any normal poker situation.
Of course, it’s not hard to construct scenarios in which you’d like to be all-in when you’re not. For instance, you have a flush draw with two cards to come in a medium-size pot (recall that most of the poker being played back then was limit hold’em). Rather than pay one or more bets on the flop and turn, you’d like to sit back and see if your draw comes in. So some players would simply pull the telephone cord out of the modem plug on the computer when they flopped a flush draw.
The sites counter-attacked by creating “No disconnection protection” tables (or “No all-in” tables, as they were rather inappropriately called, at PokerStars). Ultimately, the use of dial-up virtually disappeared and the poker sites simply eliminated the disconnection protection altogether.
So there you have it – two stories from the old days. I will roll out more as time and space permit – I think it’s important for all of us to have a sense of our community’s history.
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Lee Jones is the cardroom manager of Cake Poker and has been in the online poker business for over six years. He is also the author of Winning Low Limit Hold’em, which is in its 15th year of publication.
More Articles by Lee Jones
Don't Fear Chinese Gold Farmers Dec 21, 2009
Thoughts from the 2009 WSOP Final Table Nov 23, 2009
Home Games are Better Than Casino Games Nov 07, 2009
Pretend It's a Bank Sep 14, 2009
This, Too, Shall Pass Aug 27, 2009
The Arc of a Home Game Jul 14, 2009
Getting What You Want from an Online Poker Site Jun 21, 2009
Lee Jones Podcast - May 21, 2009
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