July 22, 2007
PokerPro
I played a poker tournament today. It was a $50 sit and go on my honeymoon cruise on the Carnival Legend. I played mainly because it was on one of those PokerPro tables, and I'd never seen one before. Being a much bigger fan of online poker than live, I was definitely predisposed to like it, even though the reviews I'd gotten from fellow cruisers were largely negative. My verdict, however, is that poker dealers shouldn't be too worried about their jobs. And poker players considering playing at one of them should save themselves some pain and instead just jab a rusty fork in their eye.
I'd had the idea for an automated poker table (and discussed it with many friends) long before the poker boom made such a thing economically feasible, so I was curious to see how much different (and, I presumed, better) theirs would be than the one I had envisioned and decided customers probably would not like. Given the positive reviews I'd heard from the poker media, I had assumed they'd come up with some better technology than I had thought of. I was wrong. Very, very wrong. PokerPro tables are considerably worse in most of the areas I felt would be tricky than my imaginary table of seven years ago, and far worse than anything I would have guessed someone would release to the public.
For those who haven't seen one, each player has his own touch screen that has a small representation of the table and everyone's stacks and/or wagers, somewhat like an online poker room. The center of the table holds a giant screen, which contains the board cards and digital representations of any chips wagered, as well as a little box containing each player's stack size.
The problems with PokerPro are numerous, and I only played a little under two rounds, so I'm sure there are plenty I have not yet discovered. The biggest snafu is definitely the touch screen. It's extraordinarily hard to use. Pushing a button with your finger is near impossible. You pretty much have to use a credit card or some other such makeshift stylus if you don't want to drive yourself nuts. And even then it's pretty brutal. You have to tap a button twice to use it. The first press highlights it, the second, if you touch the highlighted button, performs the action. But if you touch anything else, it unhighlights the button, forcing you to push it twice again. That might be a good feature if the touch screens were even merely average in quality, but on the abysmal ones they use (I don't even know where they found touch screens that bad. Maybe there was a sale at Big Lots or something) it was beyond annoying.
It seemed that almost every hand, someone had to push a button 4 or 5 times before it went through. You could see that everyone was visibly frustrated within minutes of the tournament beginning. And the lady next to me, who kept trying to double tap quickly with her card and was, for some unknown reason, totally incapable of hitting anywhere near the same spot twice, must have had to tap fold a dozen times on more than one occasion.
Your hole cards are tiny, so wear your reading glasses, and they're in the bottom right corner of your screen, which is uncomfortable at best. You have to tap them to view, and good luck managing to do so with your credit card while also sufficiently covering them with your hand. Also you don't have to double tap them, and for some reason they chose not to outfit the screens with a privacy filter that would make it unviewable from an angle, so the slightest accidental bump can expose your cards to neighbors. This too happened a few times in the maybe 15 hands I played. It was hilarious to me that most of the time people wanted to push a button they had a hard time doing it, and the one time they didn't, it kept happening on accident.
The table has the same sounds an online poker room does for the most part, shuffling cards, dealt cards, chips clacking, etc., and they come out of a small speaker on your touch screen. One very noticeable missing noise, however, was an indicator that it is your turn to act, which is also humorous since most serious online poker players turn off all sounds but that one. The acting player is denoted only by a small and hard to find yellow arrow on the center screen beside their stack size. If you, like me, get annoyed at how often players aren't paying attention and don't know when to act in a casino, and dealers who don't do their job and keep the game flowing (which is most of them) you'll hate PokerPro. It somehow manages to be worse.
Also players have 30 seconds to act. This would be fine, except that the machine has no way of telling the player it's their turn, or for that matter knowing if they're even in their seat. If someone goes to get a coffee, there's no dealer there to muck their hand, so the whole table waits for half a minute.
So, players don't know when it's their turn to act, just like in brick and mortar poker, and when it is, it's even less likely that the table will alert them of it than your typical bad poker dealer. And you have the same annoying waste of time problems you do online, though even worse since if there's a "post and fold in turn" box you can check, I couldn't find it, and even if I could, it's unlikely I'd be able to check it in under 5 attempts. It's more or less the worst of both worlds, plus some, and it makes me wonder how anyone can seriously give this table anything but a terrible review.
Unless these are vastly improved they're not going to catch on. I don't think most people are ever going to relish the idea of replacing dealers and chips with buttons, but if these tables improved to a certain point I do think enough people would be willing to tolerate them that it would make economic sense for poker rooms to ditch human dealers and fill the room with automated tables. The costs involved with dealers, chips handlers, and other employees who could be eradicated or reduced in number are tremendous. When you count salaries, benefits, turnover, the relatively slow speed at which they operate, tokes (which are essentially an extra rake that the casino doesn't get) and such, you realize that poker rooms would gladly lose some percentage of their action if they were able to cut out all of that unnecessary overhead. I don't know what that magic number is. I once did some math and determined that an automated poker room would make about the same as a normal one with only 2/3 of the action, but that was using educated guesses to estimate expenses. I could have been off by a bit either way.
Nonetheless, I'd guess that if the Bellagio removed all humans and put in PokerPro tables, they'd lose a lot more than 1/3rd of their action. It would probably be far closer to 100%. They're that bad. And I'm saying that as someone who would like nothing better than to never see a human dealer again. I dream of no more misdealt cards, no more waiting for shuffling or pot splitting, no more bad rulings when things do go bad, no more mysteriously appearing or disappearing chips in tournaments. No more of the many human errors that a machine would be incapable of.
So Poker Tek, you seriously need to go back to the drawing board, because your product is atrocious. Card Player lied to you. You're terrible. You hold a lot of promise, but you need to invest some serious time and money into improving the UI. I'll even tell you how to do it for a reasonable fee.
Posted by themaroon at July 22, 2007 7:07 PM
Comments
I don't remember tapping the cards to show them on those tables.
I believe you had to cover the cards with your hands to view them. Much like to do to peel and cover your cards up at a regular table. This feature was actually well-received.
As for the chips, yes, that was the biggest complaint at the WPBT tourney and definitely needs improvement.
Posted by: Drizztdj at July 23, 2007 12:10 PM
I'd heard that about the cards and expected that, so I was surprised. Maybe I was playing at an older version? Either way, it was a small part of an overwhelmingly underwhelming experience.
Posted by: Matthew Maroon at July 23, 2007 1:54 PM
These tables are horrible. I told my friend that if poker rooms started using them all over, I would quit playing all together!
Posted by: Michelle at February 20, 2008 7:02 AM
You must have been playing on an older version as I play regularly at Mohegan Sun and only hear rave reviews about Poker Pro.
You make a few good points but then contradict yourself...ie; difficulties tapping the screen to get a response, then accidently tapping...if they made the screen respond easier, people would be complaining that it displays to easily to the touch.
You also complain about the 30 second response time...not very long to wait for someone who is not paying attention and will most likely loose the hand for not paying attention, I'd wait 30 seconds to gain some additional money. If you dont know its your turn to act, you're not paying attention and you should be lying on the ship deck instead of playing poker.
There will always be a need for dealers for those who want to play in real games with real chips and cards, but I feel this is a good alternative for those who want simple poker play without the apportunity to make the mistakes of improper play.
RJP
Posted by: eagle at March 10, 2008 7:34 AM