Re-exploring the combination of blockchain and Texas Hold’em.
Author: Gua Ge
I recently read a 100-page report written by Research And Markets.com last year, which analyzed the current status and future development of the online poker market. The report predicts that by 2032, the global online poker market will reach $283.4 billion, while the current market size is about $96.8 billion.
Texas Hold'em is the largest online poker competition. There are other games like Omaha, which are not comparable to Texas Hold'em in scale. Therefore, this article takes online Texas Hold'em as an example to analyze the necessity and practical cases of combining competitive online poker tracks with WEB3. Online Texas Hold'em is also divided into two categories: cash table and tournament. Cash table is the kind that everyone often plays at offline gatherings, and you can buy in chips multiple times. At present, the international community mostly classifies cash table Texas Hold'em as gambling, while tournament-type Texas Hold'em has been listed as an e-sports competition type by many countries and regions, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, several states in the United States, etc. Taiwan in Southeast Asia has also clearly enacted laws to support Texas Hold'em tournaments as a type of e-sports project to carry out activities.
To be honest, I have been playing Texas Hold'em for more than ten years. I am a casual player who is not very good at it and therefore not addicted to it. Fortunately, I have done a lot of theoretical research. I bought several books to take notes, and I never get tired of watching various Texas Hold'em videos. However, I never thought that online Texas Hold'em is still a business worth hundreds of billions. After entering the crypto circle, I found that the proportion of friends who play Texas Hold'em in this circle is no less than that in the financial circle. There are several reasons:
First, although Texas Hold'em is about skills and psychology, the underlying gambling and luck are also the fundamental factors that attract players.
Second, those who can stay in the circle for a long time are either good at numbers or social geeks, and Texas Hold'em is most suitable for these two types of people;
Third, it is very boring for crypto people to face the computer every day. Having an easy-to-play online game as a social tool to connect with others can increase the emotional value.
Therefore, the user profiles of the crypto community and the attributes of Texas Hold'em players can be highly overlapped. It is no wonder that after we have been exposed to the WEB3 Texas Hold'em community, we magically discovered that those top poker players who often appear in high-stakes cash tables such as WPTpoker or Huslter are actually crypto bosses...
If only the characteristics of the users in the two circles match, this narrative is not sexy enough to keep W Labs researching "crypto + online Texas Hold'em" for so long. Old friends of W Labs should know that in our second 10,000-word investment research article in 2022, "The Future Road of Gamefi's Chain Game Economic Model" (https://mirror.xyz/0x5c15d8bE6A1dcb715d998d60ed06732f71DCf432/PZscW7w1sbaOdXRUriLYZy8NZKYHH9cb8alShek4Lyc), we specifically used Texas Hold'em as an example to explain what kind of games are suitable for chain games.
Looking back at this article now, it only argues that blockchain games should be of a type similar to Texas Hold'em based on the game rules of "easy to get started + thrilling every step", but it does not analyze it in combination with the characteristics of blockchain itself: If the main characteristics of blockchain are integrated into online Texas Hold'em, will there be a fundamental improvement in certain aspects of the original industry?
Huige, partner of W Labs, wrote an article at the end of 2022 titled "Comparative Analysis of Texas Hold'em GameFi Games"
(https://mirror.xyz/0x5c15d8bE6A1dcb715d998d60ed06732f71DCf432/PbYqPxB7EuRBs3AGuVxIokA8KmgtyZ2QFAYoDUxxEM4 ), which mentioned some changes that blockchain technology may bring to online Texas Hold'em. The reason why we wrote this article at that time was actually a byproduct of providing economic model consulting services to a WEB3 Texas Hold'em project. We simply wrote down some of our thoughts and ideas. The article briefly mentioned the convenience of payment and the transparency of licensing, which can be improved with blockchain technology. Two years have passed in a blink of an eye, and I am glad that some of these points are already being developed and verified.
Two years have passed, the WEB3 industry has experienced ups and downs, practitioners have separated and reunited, and after experiencing the helpless sigh of "it's all a bubble", we are more focused on studying those projects that may use the characteristics of blockchain itself to change a certain WEB2 industry or product. Even a little change is more reassuring than the Ponzi model of "I know it will definitely collapse, I just believe that I can run faster than others." So in the current sluggish market, we picked out some tracks or products, focused on tracking and analyzing, hoping to see their long-term development in the future, and the online Texas Hold'em track was the first target we picked out.
1. How blockchain technology changes online Texas Hold’em
Blockchain technology can completely fill in some of the current pain points in the online Texas Poker track. This is already a consensus among many teams engaged in blockchain Texas Poker. We will explain it systematically below.
1.1 How to prove that there is no cheating in the card dealing: transparency of card dealing
I remember when I started playing online Texas Hold'em a long time ago, an old classmate who was running a private online Texas Hold'em game at the time kindly advised me: Don't play big online, the cards can be adjusted at will. Think about it, the centralized card-dealing process can be adjusted at will by the platform's own scientists. So later when I was itching to play, I only played small games on Pokerstars, because Pokerstars is the largest in the world, and it doesn't have to do evil for you small scattered investors, but it still has the ability to do evil! This is like the centralized institutions in the crypto circle, which have always been balancing their brand value and the benefits of doing evil. For example, if you deposit tens of billions of U in a certain security, when a certain security has cash flow problems, would you not want to do some small tricks to embezzle some of your funds for emergency? Don't challenge human nature.
If the cards are dealt randomly using a protocol, and are recorded on a tamper-proof blockchain, and everyone confirms that these records have not been manipulated through zero-knowledge proof ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof), then the transparency of Texas Hold'em cards will be perfectly solved. Zero-knowledge proof is a powerful concept in cryptography. Academician Yao Qizhi of Tsinghua Yao Class is an expert in this field. It is a way to prove the authenticity of something in a certain way without revealing any specific information about the thing.
Some people say that some excellent online Texas Hold'em games now use the RNG (Random Number Generator) mechanism instead of a simple card-handling mechanism. Doesn't this ensure the fairness of the cards? I am a layman in technology, so I humbly consulted some code experts. The conclusion is: RNG also has different levels of design, and it is still under centralized control. Even if the RNG process itself is fine, the exit and entrance will still be controlled by humans. Therefore, if RNG is regarded as "anti-cheating system V1", the ZKP + RNG mechanism of blockchain can be called "anti-cheating system V2".
How to embed zero-knowledge proof into the Texas Hold'em card dealing system without affecting the smoothness of dealing and the player experience has been developed by different teams in the past two years, and it is very expensive. But I think this is the most basic point that blockchain technology can change the online Texas Hold'em track. With this point, other points can be added to the icing on the cake.
1.2 How to prevent collusion and account manipulation: fairness among players
It is impossible to completely solve the problem of cheating and playing with fake cards in online Texas Hold'em. Human greed is endless. What the project can do is to continuously increase the cost of cheating and playing fake cards without affecting the gaming experience of regular players.
The WEB3 Texas Hold'em projects we have played have various ways to deal with collusion and number brushing, which are mainly reflected in the rules. For example, some projects have cash tables, and only the administrator sends links to invited members, and the link becomes invalid after one entry; for example, MTT Sports, which has the strongest rewards now (this time it held a big event on Singapore token2049, because the official competition started in October, 1 BTC is given as a bonus every week, and a total of 100 BTC is waiting for Texas Hold'em masters from all over the world to play), gave up the cash table business model and only did competitive competitions. Moreover, high-level competitive competitions must require a higher level of identity authentication, and they need to show their faces to verify their identities. At the same time, players will be asked to change tables randomly during the competition.
The improvement of blockchain technology in this regard is that it can determine which accounts are partners or small accounts within a certain range based on the big data of players recorded in the blockchain, and then make a decision. If players are dissatisfied, they can appeal, because the actions that happened before are recorded in the chain anyway.
1.3 How to protect funds: decentralized wallets
If Texas Hold'em players still remember how Full Tilt Poker, which was once popular more than a decade ago, went bankrupt, they should all support the introduction of blockchain decentralized wallets.
More than a decade ago, Full Tilt Poker was second only to Pokerstars. Even the poker god Ivey supported it. However, the centralized system caused the team to lose players' deposits of $400 million to only $60 million, and many people lost all their money.
This kind of thing is actually very common in the crypto circle. The FTX incident is a replica of Full Tilt Poker. If you can use a decentralized wallet to log in to online Texas Hold'em, the main assets are placed in a decentralized wallet, and the project party has no right to call the assets in it, and only a small amount of funds are placed in the project's centralized account to lubricate the game process, even if the project runs away, most of the assets are still in your wallet.
1.4 Convenience of circulation and payment: automatic settlement of cross-border contracts
Long ago, when playing Pokerstars, you could only find sellers on Taobao to top up your account. This strange business model existed because of circulation obstruction. What if there is no Taobao in a certain area? The last benefit that blockchain brings to online Texas Hold'em is that entry chips can be obtained as long as there is an Internet connection, and the rewards are automatically settled through contracts embedded in the game rules. If you want to cash out, you can do it through the WEB3 withdrawal channel.
In this article, we summarized how blockchain can change several native features of WEB2 "Online Texas Hold'em", which can directly hit the pain points that users suffer from but have to accept from WEB2 online Texas Hold'em projects. Such projects can combine blockchain technology to produce a chemical reaction, so that the team, investors, and users can establish a slightly longer-term basic consensus: this project is at least trying to change some existing unreasonable phenomena. In the next article, we have prepared some actual WEB3 Texas Hold'em project cases to discuss in detail.
To be continued.
