How far poker has come and the horizon poker is racing towards....
OUT OF THE POKER SWAMP As primal poker evolves through the internet into the fast paced online game that has made the words Texas and Hold’em more used than the words Posh ‘n Becks, it’s interesting to reflect how things were and the benefits that are ahead of us. If you were a serious poker player twenty years ago you’d probably have to drive for hours to find a casino or club with a decent poker room. On arrival you’d join gaming’s equivalent of a train station’s waiting room and if you were lucky someone would eventually drop out and you’d at last be in a game which might be straight and which might not. In the late nineties when poker crawled out of its dire neolithic environment and onto the web, it hasn’t looked back. In the two hours it took you to drive to a game you could now go online, find a table to suit you more or less right away and play 120 hands in as many minutes. Progress of course brings its own problems as well its overwhelming blessings. Expectations for speedy play mean that players raised in a web based environment don’t even have the patience to tolerate the 30 hands an hour you are likely to get in the latest state of the art bricks and mortar casinos which have done everything they can to try to emulate the internet’s massive success. The fact is, committed online fans like myself and most everyone else, still like the occasional live game to give Hold’em its human face. So it comes as great relief that ingenuity in the form of Speed Poker is responding to the onliner’s “need for speed”. One of the main problems with live poker is that physical dealers have to conclude each hand with a proper degree of oversight, then shuffle the cards between hands and of course each individual player tends not to be “timed out” if they take an age to make a decision. Not even the slickest dealer in Las Vegas can match the speed and randomness of an automatic, secure, computer-generated algorithm which whizzes you into the next game within seconds.
ENTER SPEED POKER As we predicted last year, Speed Poker has finally hit our shores big time. Speed Poker is a hybrid of online hi-tech with live action poker. Players are “timed” as they would be if they were online. You have to act within 15 seconds. Any player who fails to act within the time period has his hand declared dead. It’s true that time-breaker buttons are installed to increase thinking time to 30 seconds where a difficult action has to be contemplated but each player is limited to a pre-agreed number of these per game. All Speed Poker games are limited to a maximum of six players per table which automatically brings with it the fast and furious pace one would normally expect from short-handed games. As Speed Poker has been developed by professional players it is a well thought through and entertaining game. So if you feel the need for speed but also a night out, it’s worth hunting down. It’s no replacement for online playing by any stretch of the imagination because you still have to deal with armpits, throat clearing and other surviving aspects of our previous life in the swamp, but it’s certainly a major evolutionary jump. And it hails from Oz the land of the duck-billed platypus.
