Virtue Poker: Poker Room of the Future on Blockchain
The project Virtue Poker that is about to become the first blaockchain-room with full de-centralization and maximal transparency in operation has inked deals with two famous players – Dan Coleman and Brian Rast. This is an extraordinary event so we’ve decided to have a closer look at this project.
“Excited to announce that I will be partnering with Virtue Poker as they will be leveraging blockchain technology to solve many of problems inherent in online poker. No more worrying about sites stealing players’ funds and no more worrying about many issues of game integrity…”
This is a part from official Dan Coleman’s Instagram. This is one of the most profound pros in modern poker and now he wears Virtue Poker stripe. So does his colleague Brian Rast. The latter is going to play at Poker Masters with it, for instance.
Both will be project’s councils – famous people in the community, company representatives.
About Virtue Poker (in short)
Virtue Poker is a poker room on blockchain Ethereum that is in development since the spring 2015. There is no end product, only code of 13,000 lines.
Open beta-testing is scheduled for the Q2-Q3 of 2018 and public lunch is planned in the end of the next year.
What are the differences of Virtue Poker in comparison with common rooms:
1. Complete de-centralization. This is not the first time when they talk about it in poker world, but blockchain technology is able to resolve this issue. There will be no central servers or something like this. Players won’t have any poker room accounts as all the actions will take place automatically without any third parties.
2. Players’ means protection. Below we’ll describe a detailed principle of gaming process. In brief, when a player takes a seat at the table, he uses means from his own wallet (not poker room account, his wallet). And when he leaves the table, he gets money credited to his balance.
The room also has Justice System, which negates any tries of fraudulent actions; bots, multi-accounting, collusion etc.
3. The project is developed on Ethereum blockchain. This means the system fully depends on development and well-being of Ethereum. There are positive and negatives sides in that (we’ll tell about this below).
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
How to register?
You can crate and account at the official website now but that is just a formality. There are nor desktop client, nor mobile device client. In the future one will need to make an account via uPort to be able to log into the room.
How to make deposits/cash outs?
Virtue Poker doesn’t keep, accept or gives away players’ money. Instead of it, user sends part of his means (buy-in) to smart-contract of the table, which ill control them during the game (as well as buy-ins of other players at the table). After that table contract will make payments back to players’ wallets.
Note: it is NOT controlled by the room.
Which other contracts will be used?
Aside for the tables, contracts will also manage the following spheres:
All Virtue Poker games registrations.
Multi-table tournaments
How many hands one is able to play per hour?
70-80 hands per hour at 6-max table
How big will the rake be?
The project authors don’t give any firm numbers. According to them, the final decision will be made during the closed testing. The rake is expected to be much lower than in common rooms, of course.
The residents of which countries will be able to play?
As this is blockchain, this question has no logics in it, but from law point of view the answer is the following: the authors asked for the help from several law firms nd find out the subtleties of this difficult issue.
Major project problems
Virtue Poker may become an ideal poker room of the future but we’re far from it as of yet:
- Firstly, there is no product (poker client), there is only code and lots of promises.
- Secondly, Ethereum blockchain throughput is extremely low at the moment, but we expect a global code update in the next several months, and things will emerge from here. Will it be enough for a full-scale poker room operation? The answer to that is probably going to be positive but code transition has to be smooth for all that.
- Thirdly, according to author’s claims, general public will see the room’s client in the end of 2018. And those are the most optimistic forecasts. There are no more than ten people in the team of the project, and that makes the team much smaller than the ones of the big operating poker rooms: PokerStars, 888, PartyPoker etc.
- Fourthly, there are great issues with financing. The project lacks it. That’s why Virtue Poker will hold ICO (sale of tokens that will later be used in the gaming process). Unfortunately, the reputation of these procedures is spoiled by the fraudsters and irresponsible developers.
So let’s just get our bag of patience an keep on waiting. The things might work out just great, or we could end up with “expectation-reality” memes.
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