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Followup to Gearblog News for week 35 / Hold 'em or Fold 'em Dept.

By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 08/30/05

Following our note in Gearblog News for week 35 in the section titled "Hold 'em or Fold 'em Dept." there's an interesting item titled "Online Games Are Written By Humans" on the blog Haacked.

The item discusses an article in the dead tree only magazine 2600, The Hacker's Quarterly which notes an interesting issue with a newly released BlackJack game on the Paradise Poker website: "In BlackJack, when the dealer is showing an ace, the dealer offers the players the option to purchase insurance. This is a way for the players to pay to cut their losses should the dealer have ten (10, Jack, Queen, or King) in the hole. ... On this particular online game, [the article's author] noticed that when the dealer did have a pocket ten, there would be a noticeable pause before he was prompted with the Insurance request. When there wasn’t a pocket ten, the prompt appeared immediately."

The result of this hiccough is that the dealer's hand is then obvious to the players and they can bet accordingly. Read the article, it raises some interesting questions about software design.

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