Texas Hold'em Poker
Texas Hold'em in the browser, played as a sit-and-go: everyone starts with the same stack, the blinds keep rising, and you play until you bust or hold every chip. It plays on a phone or tablet as well as a computer. Play the bots alone, or open a table for friends where a server deals the cards, so nobody sees anything but their own two.
How to play
Two cards are yours, five go face up in the middle, and the best five of those seven wins. Bet, call or fold your way round each of the four rounds; the last player standing takes the pot, and everyone still in at the end turns their cards over.
You are the seat at the bottom. Everyone else is a bot with a habit — one folds for twenty minutes and then has aces, one calls with anything, one raises for the sake of it. They only ever see their own two cards. Play until you bust, or until you have every chip on the table.
The table
Pick three, six or nine players. Everyone starts with 1,500 chips, and the blinds go up every eight hands on a ten-step ladder, with antes from the sixth step. There are no rebuys, and your best finish at each table size is kept.
The bots come in five styles: a rock, a calling station, a patient shark, a maniac and a grinder. The rules are the real ones, including side pots, split pots, the big blind's option, and a short all-in that does not reopen the betting. On a keyboard, F folds, C checks or calls and R raises.
The coach
After each hand, the coach grades the decisions you made in it. It scores what you knew at the time, your hand's chance of winning against the price the pot was offering, and never how the cards happened to fall.
What the deck did afterwards is told as hindsight, like a fold that was right because you were beat, and it never moves the grade. Rewarding lucky calls would teach lucky calls.
At a table with friends, a scorecard sums up your session when you leave, and the stats page charts a player's grades day by day. It is a poker training tool, quietly built into the game.
Playing with friends
PLAY WITH FRIENDS opens a table with up to eight seats, and the house fills the empty ones with bots. Send the link, or the four-letter table code. Opening a table takes a password Matt hands out in person; joining needs only the link or the code, and there are no accounts.
The cards are dealt by a server that sends each player only their own hand, so nobody at the table, the host included, can see a card that is not theirs. Up to three players can talk over voice chat.
For a regular game, a group keeps its members, avatars, chip bankrolls and history from one night to the next.