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Enter Doyle Brunson. Aka “Texas Dolly”. This 88 years old legendary poker grandpa is 10-times World Series of Poker winner. Not only that! He sat at poker tables for 50 years. Amassing a fortune of close to $10,000,000 just from his tournament winnings alone. Now THAT’S gonna put a smile to your face.
But what if Doyle chose to play online poker? Would the odds be in his favour? Just a quick look tells us it’s highly unlikely. Why? Because in online poker:
- You cannot see the other players, so you might as well be playing against the computer.
- You need to trust that platform’s software doesn’t reveal your cards to some players, as it already happened in the past. Find out the full story here.
- You might be the only guy joining the game online, with all others sitting in the same room and cheating you. Heck, this might even happen offline, but you definitely have a higher chance seeing it through.
- There is no 3rd party audit done on platform’s software to give you peace of mind that everything is by the book.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. That’s the reason why most online players carry a lot mistrust towards centralised platforms. But what choice do they have?
Blockchain to the Rescue
Yes, it’s true that blockchain can make all the difference and bring back the trust into online poker gaming. Not only that. If the case study for decentralised poker is successful, it can be used in many other turn based games. But truth to be told the journey there won’t be easy. Here are couple of obstacles that you might encounter on the road:
- Creating mechanisms to ensure transparency in the game is everything but easy.
- Companies lack the tools, skills and scalability to develop real and complex decentralised games on blockchain.
- For most software developers it’s hard to switch and be productive developing games in blockchain environment.
- Data stored on-chain is only in kilobytes.
But it’s not all gloom and doom out there. Here’s a little light that could potentially be a harbinger of awesome things to come for decentralized online gaming – introducing Texas HODL’em (I just love the name so much!). Developed by Cartesi, it’s the first fully decentralised poker game on Ethereum. EVER.
So what’s so cool about it and how does it bring a potential revolution in online turn based games? You see, Cartesi is focusing on building the infrastructure. Just like internet cables are the roads for the internet to operate, Cartesi creates ‘the roads’ that can be used by any developer with any background to create decentralised applications. There’s no need to even code a single line in Solidity. The developers can simply use the programming language they’ve already mastered and software stack they love. Why? Because everything just run on Linux OS.
But now let’s go back to Texas HODL’em. What makes the game unique?
- It’s the first fully decentralised poker game on Ethereum.
- An example of how Cartesi’s stack can be used to simply develop other turn base online games from chess to complex battle games.
- Cartesi developed it’s own TurnBasedGame smart contract that further decrease work for developers wanting to break into decentralised gaming.
- TurnBasedGame smart contract is bulletproof. It gives you peace of mind that you can always dispute unfair behaviour. So there’s no room for shenanigans. It’s so cool, that you get your case resolved, without your private information (the cards you hold) ever leaving your device. If you’re wondering how the heck that’s possible, just check this.
So there you have it. The light at the end of the tunnel turned out not to be a train. But a great platform you can use and build your Dapps on. So how about creating your own decentralised poker platform?
P.S. And how about our 88 years old legendary poker grandpa Doyle Brunson? Would he make more money in centralised or decentralised online poker? Well… that all depends on how much you trust centralised platforms. And if they perform as well as centralised governments, then Doyle Brunson would be much better off playing Texas HODL’em!