Webcam Poker
A French-based online poker room, Monbluff.com, has just instituted a new innovation poised to make it even easier for online poker players to read each other’s tells, namely: a live webcam system.
That got me thinking about how a poker room could realistically implement webcam poker fairly and in a way that would encourage players to participate. Because I love the idea of being able to read the other players’ tells, but I’m not so psyched about them being able to read mine. The only fair way to implement online webcam poker, then, would be to have tables that are for webcam-enabled players only. In other words, only people with webcams, who agree to have them on during play, are permitted to sit in at tables where other players are doing the same.
Anyway, I was naïve enough to think the Monbluff.com was the first to do this, when I did a Google search and found out how wrong I was. PlayWinPoker.com has webcam features (though while they suggest you let people see you if you want to see them, it doesn’t appear that they’ve systematized it or enforce it). Looking further I found that Pharaoh Poker started doing this in 2006.
Finally I did just a little bit more research and discovered that what makes MonBluff.com’s webcam poker announcement so innovative is that they’re making the feature available for tournament play.
Has anyone else done that yet? And what’s your opinion of how successful the feature will be? Would you use it?