Innovations in Poker: Man Meets Machine
Gene Gioia, it’s a name you’ll likely be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.
It all started when a man got tired of the disconnect between man and machine.
Most of the online poker sites these days tend to use algorithms to deal hands based on complex principles of probability. Hence, you get an artificial, computer representation of what the cards could potentially be had they been physically dealt.
Well Gioia decided he wanted it another way. He’s working on developing a system that would use automated shuffling machines, and then display online the cards that were dealt from that deck.
The difference: Real cards are being shuffled.
There’s nothing to say whether or not this is better or worse than the computer algorithms used in dealing hands for online poker, but to be frank, it’s a novel idea.
Personally, I have full faith on the mathematics behind the software that runs many a online casino. Afterall probability is probability, simulation or no.
His main complaint is that there are several times while he was playing online and one of his straight flushes was beaten by a higher straight flush.
Of course these claims can’t be authenticated, and not to take anything away from Mr. Gioia, but what it appears that he was a victim not of the technology itself per se, but of the minority of online casinos that promote “action flops.”
Regardless, Gioia is doing it for a novel cause. He is also part of the 1 million strong Poker Player’s Alliance, that is pushing to legalize online gambling in the United States, a move that would add exponentially more consumers to the industry as a whole.
