For this week’s Critical Play, I played Poker. Specifically, I played the 247 Free Poker Online Game where you start with a fictitious $1,000 hand and play against a group of bot players. I used to play Poker with my friends quite a bit but I haven’t played in a minute so I started at the easy level to get my bearings. I played at the easy level until I understood how the bots would play and then moved up to the medium difficulty. Randomness plays a large role in a game like Poker on multiple levels. Specifically, randomness is used in the setup of cards that each player has and uses to try and create a winning hand, and secondly, the behavior of other players you’re playing against can (at least be perceived to) be random. In other words, randomness is woven into the player vs. game mechanics and the player vs. player mechanics. In my experience playing Poker, winning a hand can feel like a lottery. There’s little effort required on your side other than to keep playing chips down until you win or lose, like a slot machine. As such, the low barrier to entry for participation in Poker leveraged by elements of chance, is effective at retaining players for “just one more round”. 
In terms of the player vs. game mechanics, you’re dealt two random cards (provided the deck is shuffled) which you then use in combination of the “flop” cards, i.e. the series of face-up cards in the middle of the table. In every hand I played, I could imagine “oh what if they’d flipped over X card, then I would’ve had a straight / high pair / etc.” Since there are 10 distinct categories of winning hands, of which most can be satisfied with many unique combinations of cards, it can present the illusion that players are almost always on the verge of having a winning hand. This in concert with Poker’s random setup (card allocation), is an effective mechanism for creating habitual and eventually addictive gameplay. From a psychological perspective, once you see the winning pot slide your way or the words “BIG WIN” flash onto the screen (even if it’s fake money), it begins to train a that positive conditional response to winning.
When you lose a round, all you can see is how close you were to winning. The gold lettering vs. bland white lettering and highlighted winnings vs. the obscured view of how much money you have now further nudge you to play another round and see the flashing win screen again.
After focusing on the player vs. game mechanics, I broadened my strategy to start noticing how the bots played and if I could play against them instead. Given I wasn’t playing against real people and on an easier difficulty setting, I noticed that the poker bots displayed very deterministic behavior. If they had a good hand, they would raise by the equivalent amount, if they had nothing, they’d call. Alternatively, if I raised above $20 and a poker bot didn’t have anything, they would fold and only call if they had something. As such, I could bluff them all into folding having nothing in my hand and they wouldn’t update their model. In the image below, I kept raising each of my rounds after each player called after the first or second round and forced them all into folding (i.e. the image below). The player vs. player dynamic ended up being equally addictive because depending on how complex of a statistical model you were playing against, it could appear to act randomly. Once I moved up to medium and hard levels where the bots do learn from your play style and behave accordingly, it became increasingly more difficult to predict their next move.
As I mentioned briefly before, this game integrated randomness and illusions of chance in a similar way that a slot machine does, at least at the beginner level. For someone who’s never played before, the experience of getting close to winning or actually winning without really knowing what you’re doing or having to exert much energy to do so can be effective hooks for drawing people in. Since Poker, slot machines, Craps, and other games like these usually play with monetary stakes, I would argue that these are more morally impermissible integrations of chance into games. I don’t think many people would disagree that it’s at the very least morally ambiguous to leverage addictive elements of chance and almost winnings to draw susceptible populations into spending their money for your profit. I would argue that the 247 free poker game using fictitious money is still morally ambiguous given it reinforces the same conditional reward pathways. Players who don’t get the same dopamine rush from the shiny winning lights anymore might escalate the stakes to something monetary. The phenomenon of tolerance and escalation is well documented in the psychology of gambling and does bring into question where the line should be in game design such that something free and innocent like a free poker sim) doesn’t feed into escalating behavior.
