Unrational Games: free to play games, traditional rules optional

The never changing lobby

The part of the poker client that generally gets the least attention may actually be the most important.

In 1997 I was an undergraduate at Oxford, regretfully not spending my time coding a website to rate the attractiveness of fellow students. Google was an actual search engine. Amazon made the decision to sell more than books. There wasn't really an iAnything. That year also marked The Beginning for online poker. The lobby of the time was a list of available tables in, unsurprisingly, a table. This is because the standard way to list items with some attributes is as a table. The underlying UI technology of the time also had built in support for tables as they are a fundamental display grouping and spreadsheets are the evil substrate out of which all software grew. So, in summary, it was tables, displayed in tables, using tabular technology.

Of course, this was just the first iteration, and it was over a quarter of a century ago. Two decades after Planet Poker arrived, Party announced that "totally revamped" lobbies were officially a "major focus". That major focus led to... tables. Under some tabs (aka table filters). Two decades! To basically replicate a website. In some cases they probably spent significant engineering time building the equivalent of a proprietary browser engine to render it. This is par for the course with overhyped announcements about trivial poker client updates - here is Kindred trying to hit an investor document word count by noting that they are designing features to 'avoid free text becoming too emotional' by using a 'library of animated memes and emoticons'.

Standard or straightjacket?

It would be somewhat churlish to criticise the poker client designers for this de facto standardisation. If you accept the current online poker orthodoxy, there is little wiggle room here, especially if the primary (unwritten) requirements to 'allow customers to pick from a range of different poker table games'. Some people will point to the the imposed complexity of regulatory rules, but it is really about two decades of technological development meeting the seemingly immovable object of the only customer cohort you really care about becoming attuned to a specific UI workflow. I doubt that any members of a poker room team have woken up one Monday morning, thrown off their rake table covered duvet, and exclaimed, Jerry Maguire style, "Today I am going to propose a radical departure from the accepted norms for the lobby as it will be an exciting all-in bet on my job!"

The problem with that approach is that it significantly reduces the competitive terrain. Now you have to overtake whichever company is currently mining the very very very grey markets based on your unique ability to customise the colour of the virtual table felt. Emoticons allows Kindred to add a few 'better add something about poker' lines to their end of year report, and implementing and blogging about table felt colours evidently keeps some people at Entain partly occupied, but the question 'how can this possibly turn us into the leader in the poker category?' must be the elephant in the room.

Routing and status

The mistake here would be to think that the opportunity/problem with the lobby is a UI issue, exploited with a swipe of an artistic brush. It is actually a business model issue. The lobby is fundamentally a routing product with a secondary role of status. It is routing in that it helps players move to different product areas with more or less efficiency. Sometimes this aspect can be considered agnostic from an operator perspective (although this is less true now than a decade ago), sometimes it is an explicit choice. Status, in the current setup, is a minor concern - often as insignificant as a number representing your bankroll. Rejecting the concept of presenting a customer with a slightly curated list of revenue generating options changes this balance. Now you are optimising for pathways (preferably dynamically adapting ones). The status element becomes relatively much more important, reflecting a multifaceted customer journey. Tables also become a hindrance in that model, so you can eliminate the pointless scrolling up and down.

As unpoker is not a poker product we have a bit of an advantage here - we don't need to follow 'the rules'. Like a traditional poker site we have different games, but in most instances they would not exist in a structure that would benefit from a tabular presentation. The lobbies of unpoker implementations will ultimately more closely reflect the thematic structure rather than the product one, in line with a horizontal approach. As they are effectively more code than graphics, it also opens interesting optimisation opportunities (this is inspired by artwork personalisation on Netflix). If there is a core principle here, it is that the complexity inherent in today's lobbies should be removed or hidden. You want to make it easier for the customer to reach the right place.

No surprises

Those of a certain age (principally Generation X-ers) will remember that Radiohead's era defining album, OK Computer, was released in the same year as Planet Poker arrived. That album is still widely regarded as a classic, even if its direct influence on the music of today has diminished with time. Some things are standout moments in the development of an art-form, but they should never represent the pinnacle of innovation. Tabular lobbies in online poker sites are more the equivalent of MMMBop by Hanson - perfectly fine standard pop for 1997, but this is the Taylor Swift generation.

Philip Atkinson, CEO, updated April 2024

This is a series of posts exploring aspects of the gaming industry and how they relate to unpoker. The first instances of unpoker, branded unpoker : rivals, are arriving soon - keep an eye on the blog, or follow us, or the game, on X, for details.