I don't remember the particular site - it was before my online poker time anyway - but there was a case of a (probably inadvertently) broken RNG. The effect was drastically to limit the number of possible shuffles. Not good.
As you say, there's little competitive advantage to be gained from a site's software. At least part of the client's perceived benefits are in useability and graphical attractiveness and those are duplicable. Performance (you don't want your PC grinding to a halt when you start 2-tabling) may have some proprietary aspects, I suppose, although it's hard to imagine how client software could be that much of a resource hog.
I think there could be a little more that's of interest in the back end architecture, but the RNG is pretty much independent, and I'd have thought it would be a to a site's advantage not just to get "independent" audits of randomness but to publish the code. But what do I know?
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Date: 2006-05-19 08:56 (UTC)As you say, there's little competitive advantage to be gained from a site's software. At least part of the client's perceived benefits are in useability and graphical attractiveness and those are duplicable. Performance (you don't want your PC grinding to a halt when you start 2-tabling) may have some proprietary aspects, I suppose, although it's hard to imagine how client software could be that much of a resource hog.
I think there could be a little more that's of interest in the back end architecture, but the RNG is pretty much independent, and I'd have thought it would be a to a site's advantage not just to get "independent" audits of randomness but to publish the code. But what do I know?