Planet Poker

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

~ the last words ~

Randy Blumer was 39, an engineering graduate of the University of Alberta and a retired marine systems engineer from the Canadian Navy, when he started building a cardroom in the summer of 1997. He licensed the software from a company called ASF Software, whose development team was led by an engineer named Carl Anuszczyk, and bought advertisements in Card Player magazine through the testing months so that there would be somebody at the tables when the doors opened.

On 1 January 1998 the first table went live: a $3-$6 game of Texas hold 'em, five percent rake with a three dollar cap. That hand is the boundary line for the entire industry that followed. Sometime in February a game kept going overnight and ran all the way into the next evening as players rotated in and out, which was the proof the whole idea needed, because it meant the tables could stay full without anybody organizing them.

Almost everyone playing was on dial-up, and the technical side was brutal in a way that later operators never had to live through. Outages lasted days. In 1999, during one stretch of downtime, a competitor called Paradise Poker launched, and by the time Planet Poker was back the newcomer had a foothold. Peak concurrency across the two of them went to about 1,500, with Planet holding roughly 400 of it and Paradise clearly ahead on both stability and features.

Planet's answer was credibility. Mike Caro, about as recognizable a name as poker had, became the public face of the site in October 1999, with Roy Cooke joining the same year. A new software company, AceKicker.com Holdings, was formed in 2000 to rebuild the client. It lost time to an offshore developer and moved the work to Canada, and the new system did not ship until 2004. By then Party Poker owned the category.

~ the record ~

~ the shuffle ~

In September 1999 a group of researchers at Reliable Software Technologies, later Cigital, published a paper with the title "How We Learned to Cheat at Online Poker". The target was the shuffling code behind Planet Poker, which the site had put in public view precisely to demonstrate that it had nothing to hide.

The flaw was in the seeding. The generator was seeded from the server's clock, so the set of possible shuffles was far smaller than a deck of cards allows, and an attacker who knew the server time to within a minute or two was left with roughly 200,000 candidates. Five visible cards, your own two plus the flop, were then enough to work out which shuffle was in play and therefore the position of every remaining card. ASF changed the algorithm after the paper appeared. The episode is still the reason every serious cardroom since has been asked to prove its random number generator to an auditor.

~ after the law ~

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed in the United States in 2006, and it did not have to ban anything outright to work: cutting off the payment rails was enough. Planet Poker's customer base was about 85 percent American, and in March 2007 it suspended real-money play entirely. What remained was a free and subscription cardroom with play chips, carrying a banner that read "Real Poker, Real People" next to a badge insisting "This is not a gambling website!"

That whole era passed me by for two separate reasons, and neither of them was taste. In January 1998 I was fourteen, on a home modem in Turkey that topped out at 33.6k, with no credit card and no way to have moved money to an offshore cardroom even if I had wanted to. Gambling sites were, and remain, blocked here by law, so the category never became something Turkish players argued about in public the way the Americans did. I read about online poker for years before I ever saw a table.

~ a rules page, then a for-sale sign ~

The end is unannounced and has to be read off the archive. On 16 January 2017 planetpoker.com still carried the play-chip cardroom, lobby and all, under a copyright line reading 1997-2011. By 4 May 2017 all of it was gone, replaced by a single page under the title "Planet Poker - The world's first online poker site" whose entire content was an invitation to visit whenever you needed a poker rules refresher. The room had been closed sometime in that fifteen-week window and nobody wrote it up.

The rules page hung on for another few years. Today the domain answers with a redirect to an Afternic listing, where the first address in online poker is for sale to whoever wants it.

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