Topic: A public plea to SealsWithClubs - page 3. (Read 8686 times)

So how does the client know what its cards are if they are sha256 hashed with the session key.  sha256 is a one-way hash.  Does it have to brute-force them?  Seems unlikely, especially for omaha where you have 4 cards, not just 2.

It's still in plaintext like you said, EXCEPT for the hole cards, which are now hashed with sha256 using the private session key the server gives out at the start of the connection. Was very easy to figure out what the client was doing though. As I mentioned, this was implemented with the last client update they did back when I was actively playing.


Check your PMs real quick, and I'll get you a copy of the code.

EDIT: Just tested it, and after a couple line tweaks looks like it still works. At least, Lobby Chat works fine. Don't have time to thoroughly test the in-game table commands, but they should be essentially the same as last time I created it. I don't think much changed client-wise/server-wise between "3.00 B7" and "3.00"...

I noticed a few months ago that the flash client communicates in plain text with the server, but didn't do anything with it.  I think at the time it was sending my hole cards in the clear too, but maybe that's changed now.

I don't understand what you're talking about when you say you could use sha256 though.

That is fascinating. I'd love to see the code. [email protected] is the best way.

Legality Issues Aside.......

I'll go outright and say (at risk of being banned from SwC.eu, which I love, because this may violate the ToS or make FreeMoney uncomfortable) that I've already completely reverse engineered the SealsWithClubs PokerMavens client to the point I can actually play from a python command line. What does this mean? Well, they could keep their backend, but I (or someone else) could develop a frontend on ANY platform if they were talented enough. If I made an Android-compatible SealsWithClubs client........ Holy shit. Can you imagine the audience? Shit, people play for hours on "Zynga Poker" or whatever the fuck, but it's all play money.

Only problem is, this little side project of mine was derailed when Diablo III came out

But I DO have a working SealsWithClubs client that is entirely controlled via a Python command line. At least, I did a few months ago and I haven't tested it since then. It probably still works, or will still work with a couple tweaks.

Translating that to a super simple Android GUI would be trivial to someone experienced with Android and GUI programming IMO, but I have very little GUI or Android programming experience. XD

EDIT: If freemoney requests it, I will send him the sourcecode for the Python Command Line client. It's super simple but super sloppy. There's a packet thread that listens and queues packets to send back and forth, and then there's a packet-parse/display thread, and then there's a command line thread that accepts user input. Most of the work was categorizing all the types of packets the server would send the client.

The server already basically tells the client what its allowed actions are at any given moment at any table, making the client software "dumb" software, meaning it doesn't have to know anything about poker, just what to display to the user.

Android GUI isn't the limitation here. You could use my source-code to develop an AJAX/HTML5 based client even and ditch the terrible Flash client. The beauty is being able to keep the backend the same, which is where all the custom (ie not easily modified without breaking) stuff is.

Or make a desktop client. Cloning PokerStars interface with a working backend can't be that difficult if I managed to create the client-backend in a week or two of work in my spare time.

The only thing complicated the client has is that they encrypt the hands dealt to you so that you need your privatesessionkey to decode them, but this can all be done with a simple SHA256 hash. This was implemented in the latest PokerMavens client update they put up. Or at least, the latest client update they put up a few months ago.

I think playing via email would be more enjoyable than through TOR.

Heh, now I'm thinking about email poker. You could have a site or sites that helped manage your hands, but make it all work via email in case the helper sites got shut down. Super insecure right? Have to train everyone to use GPG. I'm not seriously doing this, it would be ridiculous. Though slow poker in general ought get more love, in a studying sort of way. I guess no one wants to play with people who are obviously training though, would be a pretty flimsy ecosystem.

With all that said I think it will take a Zhou Tong type of developer with nothing to lose to make it.

It's not the players who have to worry, it's the site operator. Going big to the States is a risk that only makes sense if you make, literally, boatloads of money off it. There aren't boatloads of money in Bitcoin poker. There won't be until someone develops the US market for it. Which means that at the outset, for the operator, there's a long period of high risk exposure with very little payout while they try to develop this market. If they succeed in developing it without a legal challenge, larger players will jump in and take it away from them. If they fail they end up either with no earnings, or worse, in court.

Obviously poker players don't give a fuck about the legality, but investors do. I'm telling you why no big casino has been willing to enter the Bitcoin market. I heard exactly this from the owner of one of the world's biggest sportsbooks. They're watching and waiting to see if the smaller fry get snatched or not.

+1 @freemoney about poker behind being impossible to play behind TOR...

Still, the government essentially saying that they are worried about Bitcoin and Bitcoin poker and that Bitcoin is valuable would be pretty huge.

Really I hate to say that things are impossible, but poker behind TOR is pretty close.

Does anyone know any gambling games behind TOR now? Simple ones would be possible, but I suppose there isn't much demand. Though I suppose SD can be played over TOR! And the site could be reposted there easily I'd think.

Who gives a flying FUCK about the legality of Bitcoin poker? The online poker players sure as shit don't! If there is anything holding those players up from playing Bitcoin Poker, it's their faith in Bitcoin itself.

Throw the site up on Tor, fuck the government, and make boatloads of money.

And don't tell me that couldn't happen. The article I wrote on Silk Road gets over 20,000 hits a month, and growing!

Again though, they'd have to assign value to Bitcoins, which means they'd have to investigate theft, etc...  Doing anything like that is going to further legitimize Bitcoin and that's something to be avoided in a lot of peoples minds.

You raise a good point, which I think this is a common misconception in the Bitcoin community. It's not true that they would have to classify Bitcoin as a form of currency in order for gambling with it to be illegal. In most US states, and Federally, gambling with anything of any value is illegal if it can be exchanged for currency. The US government would never argue that casino chips from Harrahs are legal tender; but you can't start a website where people mail in MGM chips and get chips back, if there is an element of luck involved. The government doesn't make the case that Zynga credits are a form of currency, but Zynga would be violating state and federal law if they allowed a market to evolve in which their credits were traded out for money.

In other words it doesn't need to be "Money" to violate US law. The law prohibits anything with any value being risked on a game of chance if there's a reward. The only loophole is that some states consider poker a game of skill rather than chance; but even those states regulate who runs the games and how they're allowed to do so.

Only games of pure skill, like Gin Rummy, or Chess, or Golf tournaments, are excluded from this. The only other way around it is to either (a) only pay out money (no consideration) or (b) only accept money (no reward). If all three elements are present (consideration, chance, reward) then it's illegal gambling. Regardless of what form the consideration or reward takes.

Not necessarily true.  Some of the state laws I've read indicate that gambling anything of value is illegal online, which would most certainly include Bitcoins.

ssaCEO, I don't disagree with what you've said, but here's the thing:

They can't make a bitcoin poker site illegal unless they make "free" poker sites illegal as well.  To do that, they would have to legitimize BTC as a valid currency and as "real" money.  That's the last thing they want to do... so a BTC poker site would be tough to shut down on those grounds, simply because it would open a different can of worms that no one in the current financial industry wants opened.

We've run offshore to non-US players for almost a year, and we've consulted on this with some of the best gaming lawyers on the planet, and here's our unvarnished, and unpopular view:

1. The market among Bitcoiners who occasionally play poker is saturated, as SgtSpike said.

2. Freemoney's right on all counts: Pouring money into a slicker client isn't necessarily going mean an instant gold poker site (see: BTCOnTilt), and really high end poker software does cost millions, or at least hundreds of thousands to develop and refine. I started working on our software 4 years ago and I'm still improving it. I wouldn't claim it's anywhere near the level of PokerStars downloadable product in terms of features & whatnot. It's glossier than Mavens, but Freemoney's beating the shit out of us in terms of player volume. The point is, there is much more to building a successful poker site than having good software. And to be realistic, there isn't enough of a current Bitcoin poker market to justify further feature enhancement or even a mobile client for us at this point... let alone hiring a team to start coding what would be a $250-500k next gen project from scratch.

3. Bitcoin poker can't be profitable until it starts drawing players away from sites that take mainstream deposit methods: People who've never used Bitcoin before. What's the incentive for Europeans to leave Moneybookers and start playing poker for Bitcoins - even if that Bitcoin site has a beautiful $1M poker client? People go where other players are. The entire Bitcoin poker market right now, even though it's almost completely concentrated on Seals, is nowhere near large enough to gain traction to steal players from Stars.

No, the people who will willingly switch to Bitcoin are the ones whose options have run out, because their country has banned online gambling. And in the case of poker, that means Americans.

So the American general public is certainly ripe for *any* site that lets them play poker. They'll jump through any hoops to get Bitcoins and get there, and they don't care what the software looks like (not that much, anyway). And if Seals builds that market sufficiently before a major player steps in with existing, glossy software, they may have enough momentum to stay relevant without ever paying for a software upgrade.

But in order to do this, they would need to start marketing Bitcoin as a new way of playing poker to the American general public, outside of the Bitcoin circuit. This is what the long-awaited Infinitipoker is doing, with big sponsorships and apparently serious investment.

So it's worth asking: If there's this virgin market for American poker players, why is it that PokerStars and Party Poker and Playtech and Microgaming haven't opened up Bitcoin deposits to Americans? In a word: It's probably illegal. And no one in their right mind wants to be the first to test in court the theory that taking Bitcoins for online poker is somehow different than taking Western Union. In all probability, it isn't. A small site with no existing stake in the industry or future Vegas contracts to blow, and which flies under the radar and does not market to mainstream American consumers, may be able to make a bit of cash from the situation over the next 1-2 years before online poker is re-legalized under Vegas ownership in America. They would need to be very careful about not making too much noise, and getting out before the shit hits the fan. A site that has aspirations of becoming the next PokerStars will never, ever make enough money off Bitcoin poker games to finance the legal bill they'll see when the Justice Department comes knocking. Moreover, they will have blown their shot at future legitimacy; they will never be legally licensed in the US at some later date. That is the situation; it appears to be a wide-open playing field, but it's actually empty because all the other players have either been arrested or have already been given a backdoor deal and are waiting for a green light to re-enter the market.

Freemoney is doing the sensible thing. A GLBSE offering - which is probably illegal itself - and mass-marketing to Americans who are the only really viable market who would switch to Bitcoins to play poker right now, would be suicide.

If they want to raise funds on bitcoinfunding.com I will allow them to setup a project for a 0% fee.

Fair enough. Thanks for the correction.

Play is in EUR but you covert whenever you want (I keep my stash in BTC when not playing).  You can withdraw in BTC, but there was a 20BTC minimum last time I was on there.

If I recall correctly you can deposit with BTC, and play in USD (or maybe EUR), but can't withdraw in BTC. Not quite the same.

I may be mis-remembering, or things  may have changed since last I checked.