PKR.com

» see pkr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Online gambling is a blocked category in Turkey, so the whole industry sat behind a wall for anyone here, and i was never going to have an account on PKR. What pulled me to this grave is who built it. Jez San founded Argonaut as a teenager and co-designed the Super FX chip that let a Super Nintendo draw polygons in Star Fox. Then he spent the following decade building a poker room where the polygons were the product.

PKR launched in June 2006. Every other poker site of that era was a spreadsheet with felt behind it, seats drawn as rectangles and an avatar the size of a postage stamp. PKR gave you a body. You picked a face and dressed it, and it sat at a table in a rendered room with a camera you could move. It had chip tricks and a set of animated tells you triggered on purpose to sell a bluff.

The users came. Five million accounts registered over its life and up to 15,000 of them were at tables simultaneously, which was real traffic for a site that was not one of the two giants. Playtech supplied its casino games from 2007. The magazine tie-ins arrived, branded rooms with branded outfits, and by 2008 PKR was running live tournaments in London.

None of that changed the arithmetic underneath. A 3D client is a game engine with a gambling business attached, and the engine has to be paid for whether or not the tables are full.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The client was a large download in a decade when that still hurt, and it asked for a graphics card at a table where the competition asked for a browser. Serious volume players wanted eight tables open at once and a fast fold button, not a camera angle. The people PKR was designed to please were the ones who play twice a month for fun, and those are the accounts that generate the least revenue per head.

Then the regulated markets started ring-fencing. PKR pulled out of France and Italy, because national licensing carved one shared player pool into small local ones and small pools kill a poker room faster than anything else. In February 2016, after ten years of running its own network, PKR gave that up and became a skin on the Microgaming Poker Network. The tables were somebody else's tables from that point on. Only the avatars were still theirs.

~ how it actually ended ~

On Wednesday 3 May 2017 PKR asked Microgaming to suspend play, and Microgaming did. The Alderney regulator suspended the license the next day over an unpaid fee. On Friday the company said it had experienced recent financial difficulties and had filed for administration orders, to be heard the week after. Staff had already been sent home.

The number that mattered was not the company's. Roughly 60,000 players had balances sitting on PKR, around two million dollars in total, and that money had never been kept in an account separate from the operating cash. It was not there to give back. In July, PokerStars did something nobody had to do: it bought the brand and the domain from the administrators and credited every one of those 60,000 players the full value of their final balance, dollar for dollar, in a PokerStars account. Videoslots bought the technology in November.

~ what got buried with it ~

The avatars are the loss. Nothing since has tried to put a human body at an online card table with that much care, because the market answered the question clearly: people playing for money want information density, not a face. PKR spent eleven years being the best looking poker room in the world and it ended as a licensing footnote inside a Maltese casino group.

The other thing buried here is a lesson that keeps needing to be relearned. Segregated client funds are the least interesting line item in a gambling operation, and they are the only reason a shutdown is a bad week rather than a theft. PKR's players got whole because a competitor decided the industry could not afford the headline, which is a thin thing to rely on.

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