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Laptopgate: The Poker Controversy Waiting for All Games

Laptopgate: The Poker Controversy Waiting for All Games

by | Jul 26, 2024 | Sweep It Poker

The world of poker has been in full riot the past week. The game of poker isn’t a stranger to controversy, and any game as old as poker is going to have some growing pains along the way.

The final table of the World Series of Poker this year was… divisive, to say the least. What happened on the felt wasn’t necessarily the big issue though. If you haven’t been paying attention to this controversy, let’s take a few minutes to dive into it together. 

This is a very important moment in the greater world of gaming. How we use digital tools in games will be a topic that comes up over and over throughout the entire industry.

Spoilers: We’ll be discussing the final table of this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event. If you don’t want to be spoiled on the final table until you get around to watching it, don’t read further!

Solvers on the Rail

On Wednesday, July 17th, Jonathan Tamayo won the 55th annual World Series of Poker Main Event. He outlasted 10,111 other players and won the grand prize – a championship bracelet and a cool $10 million. He defeated amateur Jordan Griff in heads-up play to take home the championship. 

Tamayo is a great player. That’s not where this controversy lies. In his decade plus career, he’s proven time and again that he can sit with and beat the best. 

Also, the main event of the World Series of Poker isn’t exactly the exclusive club it used to be with a few dozen tables featuring a few hundred of the greats. Nowadays five figures of players are getting in on the action. The main event has become a mental endurance test… a test that Tamayo passed with flying colors.

The real controversy was behind the table though, at the rail. Sitting on the sidelines, Tamayo’s friends rooted him on. Also fellow pro poker players, Tamayo would be crazy to not occasionally ask for their advice on a tough call within the game. This is pretty normal practice. Coaching is allowed.

The real trouble started when everyone watching at home could see what was going on at his friends’ spectator table. A laptop sat there facing away from the playing area. Clearly visible on the laptop screen was a popular poker simulation platform. As Tamayo told his friends about the hand pre-flop, they’d punch in the cards and determine his exact odds on certain calls. 

Tamayo claimed that he had no idea what his friends were doing at the rail… but in this picture captured by a spectator, you can clearly see both the stream and the solver pulled up and ready to go just as easily as Tamayo can…

For a seasoned pro, this isn’t a huge advantage. Most people who make their living playing poker can tell you exactly what the odds are for any hand pre-flop against random hands to two decimals… this is elementary stuff for competitive poker. Using AI and algorithmic analysis to verify and simulate this information against different hand sizes and differing chip stack sizes does give someone an advantage over just using their more fallible head math.

These poker problem solvers have been used more frequently both online and in person, with numerous pros having been caught sneaking analysis on their phones in recent years. Still, poker governance authorities are really yet to define the hard line on what constitutes cheating.

After this main event, they may have their hand forced.

How Far Is Unfair?

It’s important to note that Tamayo says he had no idea that his friends were going to bring a laptop. He claims he was asking for normal coaching and had little clue what was happening outside the rail.

“I mean, that stuff wasn’t under my control. My job was to play. Joe and Dom were giving me advice. I didn’t tell them to bring anything. You know, whatever was on there was on there. My job was to play. You have to be pretty narrow-minded when you’re playing. All the other external stuff is just wasted energy.” 

-Jonathon Tamayo, via Poker.org

This looks bad though. We have a professional player playing against an amateur in the biggest poker tournament in the world. The professional is not only getting help from two other professionals (one of whom is a previous main event bracelet winner), but also a dedicated computer program designed to solve poker problems. 

The World Series of Poker has been clear about not allowing poker solvers in play. How does that apply to coaches on the rail though? How did it feel for Jordan Griff playing against not only a seasoned professional, but two sideline opinions with more experience than him backed up by AI?

All in all, Griff is handling what could be considered a $4m cheat with surprising grace.

Griff spoke to Doug Polk Poker’s podcast about the issue. He was totally unaware of what was going on at Tamayo’s sideline. He had assumed that if anything going on was nefarious that the WSOP floor team would step in.

“I’m sure in their mind if they knew they were doing something wrong they’re like ‘oh, well they’ll just tell us to put the laptop away’. I don’t think there was any serious repercussions people thought would come out of that.”

-Jordan Griff on Doug Polk Poker

Griff still walked away with $6 million, so not a week of work to whine about. As he discussed on Doug Polk’s podcast above, the most disappointing thing is that everybody is talking about someone trying to scrimp any unfair advantage they can get instead of the uplifting success stories that are always around in such a massive tournament.

Hot take: WSOP winner gained 0 edge by using laptop and solvers
byu/SensationGG inpoker
Regardless of any double standard, many poker fans think that a solver isn’t an actual advantage for a professional of this caliber.

We don’t know exactly how they were using the solver, but there are ways that it could’ve clearly tipped the balance. Were they referencing the stream to see what cards Griff was holding each hand, then punching that into their sim? If so, they could’ve gotten incredibly insight into his tendencies over hundreds of hands that Tamayo never would’ve been able to glean on his own.

We’ll probably never know how much the solver helped Tamayo. In theory, however, Dominic Nitsche and Joseph McKeehen definitely thought that it would help their buddy. Otherwise, why would they even bother?

“You think you’re getting heads-up, and you’re playing against – you know – robots now,” Griff summed up. “Optically … it’s not what you want to see at final table.”

A Gaming-Wide Problem

What constitutes fair? Especially when we’re using technology to actually engage with a game, what level of human intellect is required to be considered “fair play”?

Far more poker happens online than in person. If they aren’t even hiding that they’re doing it at the biggest in-person table in the world, surely these programs are being used all the time online in big money games. What’s most interesting in this regard is that Jordan Griff is considered one of the biggest online players in the world. Jonathan Tamayo, on the other hand, is traditionally a live tournament player.

There’s a lot of big questions here and not just for poker. Due to poker’s highly mathematical mechanics, it’s typically more straightforward to build a program to simulate it than for more convoluted games… but that doesn’t mean robust tools won’t rise for other competitive games.

Let’s start with the obvious… would a casino put up with this behind a player at a blackjack table? Of course not! Would this be acceptable in competitive chess? Definitely not.

Let’s take it further. Think about strategy games you may have played, where addons and external tools are often ubiquitous. In this day of AI, where is that line between unfair help and fair help? Most ToS on video games specific one player to one account… if you’re using the abilities of tons of programmers in a tool, is that really one human player to one account?

These are big questions… and ones I definitely don’t have the answer to. The entire world of gaming will have eyes on The World Series of Poker and the Nevada Gaming Commission, however, to see what their next steps are. How they react to this controversy will have echoes across the gaming industry for years to come.

The Future of Gaming Aids

It’s important to discuss these things, because culture will decide in these moments what’s acceptable in the future. How we incorporate technology into play and competition will change the trajectory of the human race… for better or for worse.

Where do you think that line is? Do you have a hot take or a path forward from this issue?

Bring your opinions over to #gala-gold or #general-chat-gala so that we can all see multiple perspectives on this really complicated issue. There’s no easy answer, and discussion is the best way to form educated viewpoints and find real solutions.

This is also a great topic for some great table talk!

Hop into Sweep It Poker today to take down some juicy pots while you discuss it with your poker buddies at the tables!

Reliving Arcade Glory… on GalaChain!

Reliving Arcade Glory… on GalaChain!

by | Jul 18, 2024 | Editorial, GalaChain

Flashing lights and loud noises dominate your senses. Last quarter. This time you’ll get it for sure.

You pop it in and the screen comes to life. Dirk the Daring fearlessly gets to his heroic work. You use what you’ve learned all afternoon to navigate the treacherous path. It’s a perfect run so far. Just as you’re starting to get cocky, the Lizard King creeps out of nowhere. Game over. 

Just one of many horrible fates that befell Dirk the Daring.

Totally defeated and having lost your last quarter, you start to slink away from the machine. Almost automatically you sweep the coin return with two fingers – A quarter! Maybe one last game of Ninja Gaiden instead of trying your luck at this one again.

The Golden Age of the Arcade

If you were born before the 90s, chances are this sounded pretty familiar to you. All those of us who grew up in the time when the arcade was king distinctly remember those last quarter feels, or the sensation of poking at the coin return in the hopes that some other kid forgot their last coin in it.

Yes, arcades are still a thing. My daughter is quite fond of them. It’s hard to take her to a half abandoned and dilapidated arcade though and not have my mind drift to those days where games meant more than just tickets. When the arcade was the spot to be all summer long. 

Back then, the video games we could play at home were limited. Sure, depending on what decade we’re talking about there were Ataris, Commodores, NES and eventually even those late 90s persistent 300+ game shareware discs. The quality and quantity of games you could play from your couch, however, paled in comparison to wall to wall arcade cabinets and the sure chance of finding at least some of your friends at the arcade.

These were the days of no internet. The days of very limited multiplayer outside multi-joystick arcade games. The days when gaming culture was born… and that culture lived full-time at the arcade.

Dragon’s Lair, which I was referencing above, came out in 1983. Dragon’s Lair BLEW OUR MINDS! This was a time when most games were lines and dots on a screen, or at best they were made up of moving static images. Some of the highest tech out there had sprites for characters that had 2-3 poses at most.

Dragon’s Lair showed up with a Disney-quality, rotoscoped movie as its gameplay. They used the entirely new LaserDisc data format to encode a movie with multiple branching paths… one of the first examples of interactive media at this quality! It was impressive… so impressive, in fact, that sometimes you’d keep draining quarters into it even after you realized how punishing and impossible it was.

Not So Distant Beginnings

We’ve come a long way in a very short time with video game tech. The glory days of the arcade weren’t that long ago. Looking back, however, it’s really no wonder why we moved so fast. At the arcade, you could play 40+ new games in one day, talk about them with your friends, and watch hundreds of other kids playing (who were probably better than you) over their shoulder. We learned quick, which is why gaming learned quick.

Simple shapes and basic mechanics of games like Breakout gave way to slightly less simple shapes of games like Arkanoid. One by one, the kids pumping quarters in the games started to recognize genres and core mechanics. At first it was “Oh! It’s like Double Dragon”, but as our knowledge grew it quickly became “Oh! It’s a beat ’em up, co-op platformer”. 

Arcades were education. In those early days of the 70s and 80s, there were great game designers and programmers working on games. That was nothing compared to the kids they were training up though. No one had ever absorbed so much of the previously non-existent media of video games. 

Spoiler, some of us who put our time in at the local arcade ‘studying’ would go on to push gaming forward with this education. Soon the kids recognizing patterns in the games they pumped their quarters into grew into the young professionals propelling gaming into the next generation.

The Legacy of Arcades

Arcades may still exist, but they’re not always the bastion of culture they once were. That having been said, that culture is still very much alive. When my daughter used to lure three friends into her Minecraft world so they could run her newly created obstacle course, that felt very arcade. When I watch a Twitch stream and think my commentary actually adds to the group conversation, that feels a lot like crowding around the arcade champ’s shoulder while they’re taking challengers on in Killer Instinct.

I think you’d be hard pressed to find many who work in game dev today that don’t have fond memories of the arcade. This was the shared experience that helped raise us and led to the rapid progression of games through the past few decades. Whether you were setting your coins on deck for Space Invaders in the late 70s or trying to solo run The Simpsons Arcade Game in the early 90s, you helped create this industry.

There are cultures throughout the world where arcades still hold some of their former glory. Japan, notably, has sprawlingly huge arcades with an often ridiculous assortment of all kinds of games. Even those, however, are on the decline compared to their heights in previous decades.

Pictured: The Kabukicho pedestrian crossing in Tokyo, at the corner of Shinjuku Moa 2 Avenue and the Godzilla Road.
Though arcades are statistically on the decline in Japan, there are still whole districts with entire buildings devoted to nothing but arcade games.

Luckily, one thing out there is preserving the classic arcade feel… And I’m not talking about a room full of machines that dispense tickets so you can buy worthless prizes. That great force working to save some piece of this culture is probably the same thing that made you read this far – nostalgia. Adults love games too, and over the past decades we’re seeing far more arcades formatted for grownups.

It’s really no surprise that these ‘barcades’ have risen so quickly. Adults do love to play just as much as everyone else. Billions of people out there all have this shared experience of the arcade… is it any wonder we’d want to relive a little of that? Also, compared to the price of some leisure activities out there… my wallet and wife would much prefer I play some Ms. PacMan with a cheap beer in my hand for an hour or two rather than some of the alternatives.

Fun is fun, and arcades are fun that everyone can enjoy together.

Arcade Culture Comes to GalaChain

This long, nostalgic ramble has finally brought me to the point.  Those of you who have been around the Gala Community for a while may be aware of the Happy Valley Arcade Bar in Beacon, NY. The owners of this establishment have long been incredibly supportive and involved community icons across all things Gala… and they’re working on something absolutely amazing for all arcade fans.

https://www.happyvalleybeacon.com

They are currently building some of the world’s first web3 gaming cabinets. These arcade machines will connect to GalaChain and reward high scorers with $VALLEY. Eventually, these games may be playable on the PC, but the arcade cabinets is where the bulk of these tokens will come from.

Early footage from one of Happy Valley’s arcade games!

We here at a Gala are a bit on the outside looking in on this one, but I personally am VERY excited. Not only is it amazing to see people doing new and innovative things with GalaChain, but I really like the idea of a worldwide arcade high score battle. 

Information will be coming out soon from the Happy Valley team. I hear they are planning to sell arcade cabinets with $VALLEY potential among other things.

You don’t have to take my word for it though… head on over to https://discord.gg/5zJ8WqNV to join their Discord server today!

See you at the arcade!!!