Texas Holdem comes to BombSaland: free browser poker for BomberCoins
Free browser poker, for BomberCoins
There is a poker table in BombSaland now. No-Limit Texas Holdem, six seats, played for BomberCoins. It runs in the same browser tab as the rest of the game, so there is nothing to download and nothing to install. You will find it as a card in the lobby, right after 1v1 Wager.
You need an account to sit down. Guests can watch, but chips only move for players who have one.
How to play poker on BombSaland
- Open the lobby and pick the Texas Holdem card
- Choose a table. Rookie starts at 5/10, so a couple of hundred coins is enough to sit down
- Pick an open seat and choose your buy-in with the slider
- Fold, check, call or raise. Keyboard works too: F, C and R
Three tables are open to start with:
| Table | Blinds | Buy-in | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rookie | 5 / 10 | 200 to 2,000 | 1 |
| Bomber | 50 / 100 | 2,000 to 20,000 | 5 |
| High Roller | 500 / 1,000 | 20,000 to 200,000 | 20 |
The cards are genuinely shuffled
This part matters more than it sounds. Most code shuffles with the standard random generator, and that generator is predictable: with enough observed hands you can work out its internal state and know what is coming next. At a table where real player currency changes hands, that is the difference between a poker game and a vending machine.
BombSaland shuffles with a cryptographic random generator, using the Fisher-Yates method that gives every possible order the same chance.
Your hole cards also never reach anyone else. Every player gets their own view of the table in which other seats hold blanks rather than cards, so there is nothing to read out of the page. Cards only turn face up at showdown, and only for players who were still in the hand. Someone who folds keeps their cards to themselves, and that stays true in the hand history as well.
Bots that actually play
A poker table with nobody at it is not a poker table, so bots fill up the quiet ones.
They are not scripted. Before every decision a bot works out its real chance of winning: preflop with a hand-strength formula, after the flop by playing out a few hundred random finishes with the same evaluator that decides the real hands. Then it weighs that chance against what it has to pay.
Over four hundred hands, this is what that looks like:
| What they hold | Raise | Call | Fold |
|---|---|---|---|
| A strong hand | 87% | 13% | 0% |
| A middling hand | 29% | 71% | 0% |
| Rubbish | 4% | 11% | 85% |
So no, they do not call everything. They bet when they have something, they let go of weak hands, and every so often they bluff. They also take a second or three to decide, because a bot that answers instantly gives itself away immediately.
What they do not do: read your style or remember you between hands. They are a believable club player, not a pro.
Their chips come out of the house treasury and go back into it when they leave, so a bot at your table never adds or removes a single BomberCoin from the economy.
Your seat, your style
Click your own portrait at the table and you can pick one of ten characters, or use your profile picture instead. You can also put a skin you own from the shop on the back of your cards, and the colour follows its rarity, so a legendary skin looks like one.
Next to your portrait sits a small flag showing your country. It is worked out from your connection and only the country is ever stored, never the address itself.
Everything you need at the table
- Hand history per table: the board, who won, with what, and for how much
- A countdown under your name when your clock runs low, with a tick every second, so a hand never quietly folds itself while you were looking away
- Chip, card and applause sounds, following the same volume setting as the rest of the game
- The lobby chat is right beside the table, so you are not cut off from everyone else while you play
Chat now shows where people are
While we were at it: messages in the lobby chat now carry a small label showing which mode they came from. PUBLIC, LMS, HARDCORE, HUB, WAGER, CLAN WAR or POKER. Handy for knowing whether the person asking for a game is standing in the hub or sitting at a poker table. Messages from the lobby itself have no label, because that is where you already are.
One thing we deliberately left out
If you lose your stack, the window that opens does not offer to sell you BomberCoins. It offers to let you buy back in with what you already have, or to go and earn more in the hub.
Offering someone a purchase at the moment they have just lost everything is exactly the pattern gambling rules exist to prevent, and we would rather not build it. BomberCoins are something you earn by playing.
Sit down
Open the lobby, pick the Texas Holdem card, and take a seat. Rookie is cheap, the bots are friendly enough, and the deck is honest.
See you at the table.