Bold Poker Press Resources
App Video
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<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/54926307" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
App Icon
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Links
- Website http://boldpokerapp.com
- App Store https://itunes.apple.com/app/bold-poker/id517658528?ls=1&mt=8
- Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BoldPoker
- Twitter https://twitter.com/BoldPoker
- Vimeo http://vimeo.com/54926307
Images
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Press Release, December 6th, 2012
Bold Poker - now available on the App Store today for an introductory price of $1.99.
Bold Poker is a new iOS app supporting poker home games while preserving the atmosphere of the real game.
Your iOS devices as a deck of poker cards and nothing more
Bold Poker takes a radical new approach to poker on the iPhone. Its minimalistic design aims to do away with the pain of shuffling and turn your iOS devices into your personal poker dealer for Texas hold'em games. An iPad or iPhone in the middle can be used to display the shared board cards while each player has one iPhone or iPod touch in front of him that displays his pocket cards.
Real-life interaction
The interaction borrows heavily from the real-life interaction. Moving the dealer button on the iPad in the middle deals a new hand to all devices. Swiping on the iPad reveals the flop, the turn and the river. The iPhones can be titled to peek at the hole cards or turned to reveal them to the other players. Because it’s all so similar as the game with real cards, new players immediately understand how it works.
A puristic idea
“The original idea to Bold Poker goes back years. We were drinking and had three original iPhones laying on the table, when we realized how similar they are in size and shape to a playing card.” remembers the project initiator Martin Kavalar. “It was only much later, with iPhone adoption taking off, that it seemed halfway sensible to implement. When showing the app to others they still think it’s really crazy, but we’ve actually played our fair share of games with friends who were skeptical at first, but loved it in the end.”
Technical Details
Bold Poker is implemented in Objective-C and makes heavy use of CoreAnimation for its realistic look & feel.
Under the hood the Bold Poker app communicates with a custom server written in Erlang that is responsible for assigning the devices to the tables and deals the cards to them over an SSL-encrypted connection. This offers several advantages over a peer-to-peer GameCenter based approach:
- Supports up to 12 Players vs GameCenter peer-to-peer connectivity that would only allow 3 players (4 devices)
- Fully automatic table creation and joining process for the most common case when there’s only one table in the proximity
- State is kept on the server and can be preserved over device disconnects and restarts
- The use of SSL-Encryption increases security