Technology and Innovations at the WSOP
The World Series of Poker is in full swing in Las Vegas, with players from all corners of the earth four-bet-jamming their way to bracelet glory. This year, for the first time, players from Nevada, New Jersey, and Michigan will be able to compete in the WSOP Online, which runs concurrently to the live events.
WSOP.com became the first site to pool player liquidity across three states when the new network launched on May 25. Michigan’s addition to the liquidity pool will bolster tournament fields, adding more money to the prize pools.
It’s just the latest example of how technology has transformed the World Series from an event with just 393 runners at the turn of the century into the behemoth it is today. Last year, the Main Event attracted a record 10,043 players, making it the largest in its history. The top 1,507 players finished in the money, with the champion earning $12,100,000.
Poker Transformers
Once upon a time, watching poker was dull, dull, dull. Without the ability for the audience to see the player’s hole cards, it had all the attraction of a Euro 2024 England group game.
That is, until the late Henry Orenstein, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and toy inventor, came up with the hole-card cam. The tiny cameras embedded in the poker table, either under a glass screen or in the rail, transformed poker into a viable spectator sport, allowing television viewers to follow the action.
Fun fact: Orenstein also invented Transformers, the popular 1980s toys now the subject of a blockbuster movie franchise.
Now that viewers could follow and understand the game, they became inspired to play it for themselves. And happily, they could do this at home in their underwear thanks to the advent of online poker.
The hole card cam debuted in the UK in 1999 on the legendary Channel 4 TV show Late Night Poker. Coincidentally, this was the year that Planet Poker launched, the first peer-to-peer online poker platform.
Shake Your Moneymaker
The hole card cam was first used at the WSOP in 2002, and the first online satellites to the main event were launched a year later. And to the stupefaction of everyone, an online qualifier won the whole thing.
Chris Moneymakers’ unlikely victory at the 2003 WSOP main event, which saw him spin an $86 PokerStars satellite tournament into $2.6 million, is seen as poker’s Big Bang moment. In ensuing years, fields were swollen by online qualifiers, pumping the prize pools to dizzying heights, which in turn attracted more players.
At first, the seasoned pros looked down on the new arrivals and “online poker player” was an insulting euphemism for “bad player.” But by the mid-2000s, a new wave of young online players began to emerge, and they demanded to be taken seriously – players like Andrew Robl, David Benefield, Phil Galfond, Tom Dwan, and others.
Online poker gave young players like these the opportunity to play multiple tables at once and experience tens of thousands of hands in a relatively short space of time. A “poker education” that previously might have taken 20 years to acquire could now be picked up in 12 months.
This new breed brought with them a new aggression, three-betting and four-betting with far greater frequency. Essentially, technology and the online game were changing the very dynamics of the live game.
Everyone Gets ‘Good’
Meanwhile, as online poker grew, so did the tech around it. The second decade of the century saw the rise of online poker tracking software, such as PokerTracker and Hold’em Manager, which offered players a mind-boggling array of data on their opponent’s playing tendencies in real time. This software allowed you to compare anything from their 3-bet ranges to their donk-bet percentages in a couple of seconds.
Then there was Sharkscope, which allowed you to analyze your opponents’ profits and losses in tournaments and sit and gos. There was PokerStove for balancing your hand ranges and checking the equity of pre-flop matchups. Icmizer, meanwhile, helped you perfect your push and fold spots at the business end of tournaments.
In short, everyone was getting better at poker, and the fields were getting tougher. But while technology helped create the poker boom and the modern WSOP, it was now threatening to destroy it. Because everyone was now “good,” poker was suffering from a dearth of recreational players.
Players trying out online poker for the first time were simply getting swallowed up and spat out. Tracking software helped good players to multi-table at lower limits, grinding out volume at these stakes in a way that would not be profitable otherwise. Poker had become too difficult for new players. It had ceased to be fun. The poker economy needed new players to survive, and the poker sites realized something had to change.
The answer was to prohibit tracking software and to create a host of new online poker variants with an emphasis on speed, fun, and gambling. Fast-fold poker and jackpot poker tournaments were born out of this crisis.
Gradually it seemed to work, and if the fields at this year’s WSOP are anything to go by, reports of the death of poker have been greatly exaggerated.
Rise of the Machines
Around this time, there was a leap forward in artificial intelligence and machine learning. While computers had been beating chess grandmasters since the mid-1990s, they had been unable to overcome the very best poker players at no limit hold’em. With millions of variables, incomplete information, and lots of scope for human unpredictability, poker was supposed to be the game computers couldn’t solve. Humans were simply able to adapt their play more effectively.
But machine learning began to change that. Now, computers can “teach” themselves to play almost perfectly by playing trillions of hands against themselves and learning to “regret” each decision that failed to produce an optimal outcome.
In 2017, for the first time, a poker bot developed by Carnegie Mellon University, “Libratus,” soundly beat a group of human pros over 180,000 hands.
Today, humans use AI solvers as learning tools because they provide perfect game theory optimal (GTO) advice – sometimes advocating moves that can seem counterintuitive to a mere mortal. Again, technology is changing the way the game is played and allowing players to reach levels of decision making that would previously have been impossible.
Solvers can now solve poker spots in seconds, which raises the very real concern that they may be used not just as training tools but to cheat at online poker.
However, their use online is probably not as widespread as you might think. Using a solver would require a player to limit the number of tables they play to one or two, which would impact profitability, and playing at high stakes would invite scrutiny from the poker community.
Meanwhile, sites like PokerStars have security protocols in place which they claim can detect the use of solvers with a high level of accuracy. That means using a solver to cheat may well result in your account being frozen, along with the funds in it.
Chips Within Chips
Technology has not just changed the way we play poker but also the way we consume it. Advances in streaming technology mean that this year PokerGo will be broadcasting more than 300 hours of live coverage from the World Series direct to your TV, smartphone, or laptop.
Live poker streams have been revolutionized by the use of RFID technology (Radio Frequency Identification), which has replaced the hole-card cam. Each playing card (and sometimes the poker chips) used in the game is embedded with a small RFID chip. These chips have unique identifiers that correspond to specific cards.
Meanwhile, RFID readers are integrated into the poker table, usually beneath the felt in front of each player’s seating area. The readers are capable of detecting and reading the unique identifiers from the RFID chips in the cards.
When a player looks at their cards or places them on the table, the RFID readers capture the information from the RFID chips and send it to a central system. This system decodes the unique identifiers to determine which specific cards are being held or played by each player.
The decoded information is then fed into the broadcasting software. This software overlays each player’s cards and other graphical information onto the live video feed in real time, allowing viewers to fully follow the action.
Of course, RFID systems require sophisticated security technology to prevent them from being hacked. Could you imagine a worse disaster at the WSOP than a cybercriminal gaining access to players’ hole cards in real time?
The Future
With so much change over the past quarter of a century, it’s tempting to try to imagine what the 80th World Series of Poker might look like in another 25 years. Virtual reality and augmented reality are intriguing technologies, and while they may be a decade or two away from reaching their full potential and mass adoption, we can see them playing an important role in poker’s future.
High-fidelity VR telepresence will inject the social elements of the live game into online poker. Live tells will become a thing. Meanwhile, VR and AR will be revolutionary for poker training, reinventing the interactive relationship between pupil and trainer.
Players will be able to experience TV-style VR poker environments, as if they, themselves, were playing on the WSOP final table.
It could also change the way we view poker, making it seem we are in the room when we cheer on a 74-year-old Chris Moneymaker as he makes his dramatic final table comeback IN 2049.
