“I went all in and won 400k chips!” That was the moment when I got the most surprised and decided to keep playing the online Poker game called the World Series of Poker. The game is an online version of Texas Hold’em. The game is developed by Playtika and is available on PC, iOS, and Android platforms. It is for people who are over 21 years old and who want to play poker online. I hopped into a game with some free chips and was immediately paired with a table of players. The process is pretty similar to real-life poker, except that the pace is a lot faster and that the dealer of the game is fully digital.
I think what this allows is for people to have a quicker feedback loop. Winning rounds do not feel as good, and losing rounds do make people feel as defeated. One thing that I think makes this game more addictive is how easy it is to hit the “all in” button. In real life, I think the chips had more weight to it. But in this case, all it takes is a push of a button, then you could either win it all or lose it all. In my case, I won it all for the first time. Then I lost all my chips the second time I pushed all in. I guess it was the first time that made me more prone to take the risk.
Something that is talked about in the reading is the RNG (Random Number Generators), and the ways that the digital game mimics the randomness of a true physical interaction of a slot machine. I think the main difference between poker and slot machine is that for poker, you are competing with other people(in a multi-player game), whereas in slot machine you are competing with the program. In poker, people have randomized hands, and that who wins depends on who has a higher hand from the programmed dealer. So I think that online poker would seem more arbitrary and closer to real life than that of the virtual slot machine. In the game of virtual slot machines, it seems that it is zero-sum. You either win or you lose. But in online poker, there will always be a winner in each round. I think people would get addicted to poker in a different way than slot machines because for slot machines, the mechanism relies solely on the response of the machine. But in online poker, there is a social element where the player would feel pressured to call and keep playing even after losing a lot(just to show that they are not a sore loser).
