From poker chips to microchips: how technology carved a niche for online poker
The challenging classic game of poker moved online before the turn of the millennium, and in the last two decades it has become a household favorite among millions of card players worldwide. Whether you enjoy playing Texas Hold’em, Seven Card Stud or even Omaha, online poker networks have created fun, engaging platforms for players to test their skills against others from the comfort of their own home or even on the move.
The level of entertainment offered by the online poker world is second to none, providing an adrenaline-fuelled escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. One day you can be trying to “satellite” into some of the biggest poker tournaments on the planet, the next you can relax and refocus the mind by playing micro-stakes cash games.
How technology transformed video and online poker in its infancy
One thing you can guarantee about the online poker industry is that without rapid technological advancements, it would not be where it is today. Casino card games and video game consoles date back as far as 1978, when the Casino video game was released by Atari. It allowed gamers to play five-card stud poker, as well as poker solitaire and blackjack. It was even re-released in 2003 around the same time as the online poker boom.
Even eight years before the launch of Casino, the world experienced its first video poker machine. Dale Electronics developed this in 1970, installing these machines in almost every land-based casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Poker-Matic was the name of the original video poker machine, which would eventually lay the foundations for the video poker games like Pkv Games that we know today.
Today’s video poker machines make it clear what the house edge is on every device but back in the 1980s, when video poker was just making waves, the technology didn’t exist to enable casinos to calculate the house edge accurately. Instead, they would get employees to play the machines over a specified period and record how much they would win or lose to determine their profitability for the house.
As the years ticked into the 1990s, video poker fanatics were no longer content with animated screens on casino floors. The arrival of the internet encouraged the explosion of online video poker games with digital sounds and Adobe Flash animations that could be played on desktop PCs. Even then, that wasn’t ever going to be enough, particularly with many video poker players preferring to sit down and play Texas Hold’em.
The tech developments that have underpinned online poker’s global growth
The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was a client that facilitated online text-based communication between multiple parties online via a server. This technology was eventually adopted to deliver the world’s first online poker game. Players could type commands within the IRC client, while a computer program was developed to deal and manage the card games. IRC Poker became quite the phenomenon, with some of today’s big-name poker pros such as Chris “Jesus” Ferguson starting out by playing IRC Poker.
In 1998, the online poker industry welcomed its first dedicated online poker room, known as Planet Poker. Players required dial-up internet access to log in, but technical issues all too often plagued the network, including poor connectivity and regional internet outages. As the platform began to introduce more graphic-based features and enhancements, the 56kb per second dial-up connectivity still remained a big issue.
Nevertheless, it is a feather in the cap of the designers and developers at Planet Poker that many of today’s leading online poker rooms still provide software that looks incredibly similar to the original Planet Poker client, even with the vastly improved speeds of broadband and fibre optic internet. When you consider that average download speeds of dial-up internet were a mere 4-5kbs per second, compared to fibre optic which offers download speeds of more than 30mbs per second, you can understand the frustrations of those that claim the online poker rooms of today have failed to innovate and played it safe with the top-down table view.
Technology helped the online poker industry cater to the smartphone craze
One aspect of technology that has helped to revolutionize the world of online poker – particularly during and after the initial online poker boom – is mobile-based poker gaming. The arrival of smartphones in the mainstream created a demand for online poker rooms to offer dedicated mobile apps that allowed players to play their favorite tables and tournaments wherever they were. The advent of HTML5 technology was crucial at this stage, helping app developers to build consistent, cross-platform online poker experiences that translated well from desktop to smartphone. Although the debate between the benefits of native-based mobile poker apps and HTML5 mobile poker apps rages on, there’s no doubt that HTML5 has helped create high-definition, engaging and encrypted poker action that was scalable to meet the needs of the growing smartphone audience. That’s despite the fact many believe laptops are more popular among gamers than smartphones.
What future tech innovations could take online poker to the next level?
Where online poker goes next is anyone’s guess. The rapid advancement of wearable tech such as virtual reality (VR) headsets creates an exciting possibility of playing poker in new, immersive virtual environments. The idea that VR-based poker could create a more lifelike online poker experience is something that excites many within the online poker community. The main hurdle to overcome is to try and get the buy-in of VR-based poker from leading poker professionals that play the biggest games and tournaments online. Failure to do so could see it become a fad among poker fanatics and beginners looking for a fun way to play.
However, mobile poker experienced the same problem and still managed to survive. Professionals didn’t like the fact that mobile apps made it hard to multi-table i.e. play multiple poker tables at once to improve their hourly earnings. This setback could soon be confined to the history books too as foldable smartphones become increasingly commonplace. Expanding screen sizes could allow serious mobile poker players to play multiple tables more comfortably, broadening the appeal of mobile-based poker gaming.
