Imagine playing Texas Hold’em poker in a live environment, but online from your bedroom or, for those of you a bit more professional about things, your Poker Studio. Although I am unsure whether this would ever happen, I am sure the fact I had a dream about playing this sort of poker online tells me I either play too much or I am a genius. See whether you think I am crazy or genius at the end of the article!
A quirk of online poker is that you can make a bluff, contort into a variety of shapes shouting at the screen for your opponent to fold and not give anything away whilst the hand is in progress because your opponent cannot see you. I must admit I have done this many times. This is possible thanks to the anonymity of online poker. Top professional Allen Cunningham admitted in an interview recently he is very animated and emotional when playing online poker which is completely the opposite of how he is known at the live tables. My new concept was to use a video peer-to-peer platform like Skype to personalise the players and make it possible for tells to be practised whilst playing online poker and to integrate live poker concepts into the online poker game.
The positives of such an idea would be the ability to watch opponents whilst at the table thus giving you more time to practise not giving out tells but also spotting tells which would suit the skilled player. I imagined logging into a site like bwin.com, activating your webcam and starting to play with your poker sunglasses on! For larger buy-in online tournaments it would be an innovation I think would be welcomed by players. Unfortunately my attempts to change the world of online poker have a few obstacles.
In dreams, we can fly around without wings like birds but the constraints of real life make that impossible (unfortunately). My poker idea suffers such constraints as well. Whilst players would probably embrace the concept in one off special tournaments there would not be much use in using a camera against a player that is playing twelve to fourteen tables at once! How would you know the tell is for table one where you are or for their table ten?
Other problems would occur in players not fully exposing their face, using funky lighting to hide their emotions and not fully embracing the reason why the interpersonal webcam was used. This would be the death knell for my idea I feel. I do think that rather than use the cam purely for the gameplay, it would be fun that instead of an avatar you could use your web cam on specific tables where you could chat and talk to players interactively. That would be fun and I think profitable because people would enjoy talking to others and forget to play properly!
Perhaps I have stumbled upon the next cool idea for online poker. Perhaps it has already been thought of and discounted by the leading poker rooms like bwin.com. I would love to see this innovation added to the online poker experiences we all enjoy. Innovation is important because it keeps things fresh and we all wonder how the increased capability of technology will impact on the game as time moves forward.
I would love to hear reader’s ideas on what innovations you would like to see in poker rooms aside from the aesthetic improvements that sites like bwin.com regularly update anyway. Full Tilt introduced the Rush tables, which are interesting but not necessarily universally received; surely there will be more to follow as other sites look to differentiate their product and attract new players. It would be an interesting discussion to hear what big changes you think you could make to improve the online poker experience. Can you beat my idea of Live from home poker?
By Malcolm Clarke
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