Topic: SwitchPoker.com - Adds Bitcoin Deposits! (Read 5095 times)

Why?

Cashouts in normal online poker rooms are a pain in the ass.  99.99999% of Poker players have less than zero interest playing in a currency which sometimes drops in value more than 40% in a day. However if Bitcoin ever gains more widespread adoption in "traditional" online poker rooms it could be a massive increase in the usage of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.  

To put it into perspective last year (we know this because Full Tilt Poker has been sued by DOJ) FTP had cashflow in the range of $500M a year.  FTP was ~33% of the global market.  That puts global cashflow for online poker @ ~$1.5 billion per year.

Most of that is done via courrier checks, slows as shit bank transfers, VISA/MC, etc.  Poker rooms also rack up huge losses due to fraud If Bitcoin could get even 1% of that it could be the killer app. However no "reg" is going to play in Bitcoins.  Don't believe me take a trip to the 2 plus 2 forums and ask.  The massive volatility swings make it more gambling than playing poker.  You can have a winning day/week/month and have it all wiped away because the price on Mt.Gox drops 10%.  

"regs" create the critical mass that brings in fish.  If you are an unskilled player when you go to a poker room and 24/7/365 you can get a game at any stakes you want that drives adoption.  The thing sucks the most about online poker is moving money..... something Bitcoin just happens to be perfectly suited to solve.

If the "native Bitcoin" services want to gain traction allow conversion of funds into USD or EUR and get all the tiny poker rooms together working on a single network so it has a chance at real traffic.  Hire some "regs" to generate action and move this this into something real.

I think it behooves well on the bitcoin community members to keep playing at the reputable native bitcoin services like Strike Sapphire, etc.

They're free  
Yeah, more players would be nice. We haven't focused on poker, but we've been running these since we opened in July. Poker isn't a money maker outside the US market, especially if you're just looking at Bitcoin.

@btc_artist, yeah cards and chips can all be done with js-animated divs, that's what switchpoker does. Looks great, too.

Edit: @ fornit -- When I said "they're cheap" I meant, the payout's around 0.5 BTC per freeroll. They're free to join, of course.

just tried your site. looks nice. would look nicer with players.

btw arent freerolls usually kinda eh...free? 

The animations for a poker game could be done with Javascript animations, I don't think canvas is needed.

It does. It won't for awhile, but I wrote a piece of code last year that takes the first steps toward converting Flash-like code to Canvas without having to light things up pixel by pixel. There are a few other packages out (Grant skinner literally ripped mine off directly to build easel.js, and there's rumor of a falconjs that Adobe's giving to Apache to be the ultimate Flash-to-JS converter)...but although I can code some mean ass Javascript, I recognize that the engines still aren't up to the task of giving rendered graphics downloadable or flash- or java-like quality in the browser. Which is important for gambling, especially games like roulette, craps, anything with a lot of animation. Or even nice card animations. Even though it would be barely possible now to port one game at a time from Sapphire's flash code to Javascript, it would run like a hog on an iphone, no matter how perfectly optimized it was. The javascript canvas and webkit engines are just not as efficient as the AVM2/AS3 virtual machine, or the JVM. Let alone native code.

It does have to change, and it will get there. But if the reason you don't like Flash has to do with all the annoying banner ads, it's going to get worse, because Flash almost never actually crashes a browser, but Javascript crashes them all the time. The more of those banners move away from Flash and into JS/HTML5, the slower the web is going to get.

Ten years from now it won't matter, because Javascript 2 is basically Flash anyway, and HTML6/JS2 will resemble what Flash is now pretty closely. In the meantime, it's either smooth graphics on the desktop, or shitty graphics and works on an iphone.

I guess that's something that needs to change.

From what I've heard, pokermavens doesn't let operators have much access, and they seem to run pretty tight software.  I doubt it's rigged to screw over some particular player.

Is it a shitty piece of software? Definitely. But I mean, not much available on the iphone (switch, etc) in HTML5 is going to look or play much nicer. Mavens is flash, but it's really bad flash. Just like switch runs really mediocre javascript. Good flash, or good browser java, looks like a downloadable product and often performs just as well or better. I used to love playing on pokerroom.com before it got taken down by the US gov. That was all Java. I've tried to get some of that feel into the games on Sapphire. Either way, if you want to play a decent poker game, it's either going to be flash or it's gonna be an .exe download, because nothing in javascript looks very nice.

Not getting into that one.   I dislike flash for many reasons, I really had no need to mention Apple.

Next time buy a decent phone that run things

I'd love to hear freemoney's take on this.  Perhaps he'd also be willing to switch software.  I don't like Poker Mavens because it's flash and won't work on an iPhone (unless you jailbreak).

Well, Seals uses the Poker Mavens software, which I absolutely detest.  There is something fishy about the software - not only on Seals, but any site I've ever used that has Poker Mavens, there's some janky shit that happens with the cards.  Normally I would chalk it up to me being a crappy player that night or some other, explainable reason... however somehow I always manage to turn a profit at other places, but never on a Poker Mavens backed site... and it's happened on multiple different sites that run Poker Mavens as their poker room back end... so I've pretty much settled on avoiding any site with Poker Mavens.

Because they make their money the 'legal' state run lotto gambling way, no need to allow everyone to play multiple games to lose their money and have fun with it, the US enjoys the slowly killing our citizens with a weekly drawing to ensure there is only one winner a week, rather than many in a day.

Stick with your Bitcoin poker room of choice... whether it's us, or Seals or BTCOnTilt, we need you support. Word is SwitchPoker only cashes out during business hours, sometimes 24+ hours later, and has a minimum $20 withdrawal.

Anyone outside the US can come on StrikeSapphire, day or night, and play in a freeroll; they open up as soon as the last freeroll started and you can open six windows at the same time. They're cheap - about 0.5 BTC each - but only take 4 players to start. Come support us. We need the xo luv.

And our software, which is original, is a hell of a lot nicer.

Because LIFE is for patenting.

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to waste money, poker is not the only option.  Why doesn't the US gov't just ban LIFE?

lotto is ok because it depletes you of your money (your purchasing and voting power)
from that POV poker is also ok,
but problem with poker is that it makes you smarter, raises your level of awareness,
and they surely don't want THAT in their backyard,
therefore, it is illegal...

Just wondering, can you play SN&G or tournaments with switchpoker? (Didn't bother to check the site, but just asked in case anyone reading this thread knew)

Nope... at least not so far.  Kinda nice you can play it on your smartphone, too, since it's all web driven... but the interface is kind of clunky, sadly.

Interesting.  I assumed they would (like every other poker room) be using some geo-location databases to filter US players.  Might check it out tonight.