Show HN: WebRTC Poker

by kinger • 13 years ago

75 48 13 years ago

applecore• 13 years ago

Do you accept bitcoins?

kinger15• 13 years ago

No, but this option has always been in the back of my head. This has just been a weekend project for the past few months, and is still in alpha, but once I get to a stable/secure release this option will be explored.

kybernetikos3• 13 years ago

That's an interesting idea. Given how flexible the bitcoin transaction script system is, it might be possible to set up a system where the bitcoins can only be claimed by someone who can prove that they won.

nly• 13 years ago

The bitcoin script system only really allows by hashing. People have gotten very hyped up about the programmability of the scripting system in Bitcoin, but anything slightly interesting still requires trust in one or more arbitrators.

kybernetikos3• 13 years ago

I was hoping someone had found and implemented a practical Mental Poker algorithm, since webrtc is p2p, and you usually don't want to have to trust the other parties in a p2p system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

dminor2• 13 years ago

Mental poker is a neat thought exercise, but if one of the parties drops out mid-hand, it can't be completed. If there are connectivity issues or if someone doesn't like the flop that's a huge problem.

mithras• 13 years ago

In a serious bitcoin/mental poker implementation you could let people put up a bond that's used to pay the other party if you do that. It's not exactly zero trust anymore but still better than the conventional model.

karolisd• 13 years ago

Is this just 1v1? How many people could this scale to?

kinger15• 13 years ago

Ya, this is 1v1 as of right now, but a full table (9 people) is currently in the works.

alooPotato• 13 years ago

anyway to get notified when you launch this?

rschmitty• 13 years ago

I can hear my own sounds (voice, clicking, etc), is there a way to disable that?

kinger15• 13 years ago

As of right now, you can only disable the microphone completely, but I will look into taking care of this, as it is quite annoying!

Wingman4l74• 13 years ago

Are you looking at doing something like Ventrilo's PTT (Push-To-Talk) -- hotkey-based transmitting like 2-way radios?

kinger15• 13 years ago

If anyone wants to play me :) https://bitflop.me/game/play/62

kinger15• 13 years ago

https://bitflop.me/game/play/65

kinger15• 13 years ago

Im waiting at https://bitflop.me/game/play/114 for someone to join, if anyone wants to play (use your webcam please)! I'm crushing everyone today!

bodhisoma5• 13 years ago

https://bitflop.me/game/play/339

I'm a stay-at-home dad so my availability will be sporadic. It'd be cool to get in a game tho.

Timezone is EST.

rcknight• 13 years ago

Small comment: I was slightly confused by the new game form.

I assumed that your watermarked values were defualts (which i was happy with) .... so didn't change them, then couldn't work out why the create game button was disabled.

kinger15• 13 years ago

Thanks so much for the feedback! You're right , this is kind of confusing, and will be fixed shortly.

lcasela• 13 years ago

Does this use bitcoin or something?

kinger15• 13 years ago

Not right now since it's still alpha, but soon (hopefully).

dummyasking• 13 years ago

have you posted this to 2p2? Feel like they would be very receptive to a version of this game that could allow for bitcoin and potentially other wagering

kinger15• 13 years ago

This is still very early in development, and needs a lot more work before it's ready for some serious wagering.

bodhisoma5• 13 years ago

You might still want to post this to 2+2. Granted, 99% of the readers won't be interested in a play money site with virtually zero traffic but 1% will and 1% of 2+2 is a lot of people.

You might be intentionally keeping this on the downlow (so I won't go post it myself, obv) but if not, and you want eyeballs to work out the kinks, that's your place.

dl8• 13 years ago

As an avid poker player, I think this is a neat idea for a lot of casual live players to get into online play.

kinger15• 13 years ago

Thanks to all those sitting and playing against me! Its been so much fun chatting with you all. I will keep creating games until 5pm Pacific time, so feel free to join and play me! My username is ziebac.

bodhisoma5• 13 years ago

I'm interested in getting in a match as well. Username is "quux".

10/20, t1500, gogogo. =)

rjv• 13 years ago

Can bitflop games be monitored or recorded?

The answer to this may be a little misleading. There's nothing really stopping anyone from recording their own screen (which includes the opponent's video broadcast).

kinger15• 13 years ago

This is an excellent point. I will definitely reword that FAQ to account for this.

EGreg• 13 years ago

This is pretty awesome!

malandrew• 13 years ago

How would one go about implementing a distributed poker system where one could not cheat?

dminor2• 13 years ago

Even if you can manage to implement a system where everyone trusts the deal, you still have the problem of collusion between players.

You can avoid collusion by only playing heads up (2 players), but then you have the problem that there is very good AI for heads up.

In short, it's probably not possible to completely eliminate it.

Wingman4l74• 13 years ago

Heads-up play will prevent collusion based on sharing your known hole cards with others, but it of course can't prevent the "asking a friend sitting next to you their opinion on the hand"-type collusion. The webcam video feed would prevent that, though. =)

The AI for fixed limit is much better than that for no-limit (you can do more statistical math on the situation); I could have sworn it wasn't that great on heads-up but now you've got me doubting my memory.

bodhisoma5• 13 years ago

I'm really interested in poker, HU specifically, and I'd be perfectly happy if I could play an AI that gave me a challenging game but the best I've found is Poker Academy Pro and that was pretty poor. I found the AI to be sort of ridiculous and quite exploitable. And I'm not a very good player, maybe a 10NL break-even player (without rake).

So if you know of a good AI that can crush microstakes, I'd love to know about it. Since I'm in it for the challenge and not the $$, I'd be happy to play a computer.

Wingman4l74• 13 years ago

What shuffling algorithm do you use?

Here's a description of a very solid one: http://www.briggsoft.com/docs/pmavens/Technical_Shuffling.ht...

Here's an example of what can happen if you do it wrong: http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...

kinger15• 13 years ago

I'm using Fisher-Yates for the shuffle algo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle

degenerate2• 13 years ago

Do you have some links that helped you get started with the whole WebRTC setup? I watched the google i/o talk on WebRTC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HzZkd2A40&hd=1) but it's still a mystery to me how to implement STUN and ICE, which they didn't go over in the talk. Some SaaS services are popping up but I'd like to know if you did this all from scratch and what resources you used.

kinger15• 13 years ago

This was all built from scratch, and the best article I came across was http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/

This helped me understand how every part of the process worked.

degenerate2• 13 years ago

Wow, that's a thorough article. Thanks for sharing!

swaraj• 13 years ago

Crazy mic feedback :(

kinger15• 13 years ago

This is first up in my list of things to fix!

Show HN: WebRTC Poker

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