MAY 12, 2014
The Table That Never Closes
A card room has hours. It has a drive to it, a door, a floor staff, and a moment where the chips have to be pushed across a counter and turned back into something else. None of those frictions survive the move to a screen, and the removal of every one of them changed the shape of the activity more than any rule ever did.
Friction as a structure
The frictions were never designed as protections. They were incidental: consequences of the game living in a building. But they functioned as a structure anyway. Getting to a table required a decision made in advance, in daylight, about the evening. Leaving one required standing up in front of other people. Both of those are small, and both of them interrupt.
Online, there is no interval between the thought and the table. The client is already open. The seat is already available at every stake, in every format, at four in the morning on a weeknight. The decision to play stops being an event and becomes a background condition that has to be actively refused rather than actively chosen.
Volume changes the subject
The other change is quantity. A player in a room sees a certain number of hands in an evening, bounded by dealing speed and human patience. A player at a screen can multiply that many times over, across several tables at once, and the difference is not merely one of scale. It converts a game played hand by hand into a process managed in aggregate.
That conversion is good for anyone treating poker as work and dangerous for anyone treating it as relief. The same feature, the same client, the same night: it accelerates a career and it accelerates everything else at exactly the same rate.
Nothing about the always-open table is hidden. It is the product's central promise, stated plainly on every front page of the era. What is less obvious is that the promise is neutral, and that neutrality is the entire problem.