Brick and mortar poker rooms, such as Atlantic City’s seven rooms, may have taken a bit of a hit today with the launching of facepokerlive.com, an Internet poker site that uses webcams to inject a little “tell” action into the online game. One advantage live poker still has over the online game is the face-to-face play and staring down your opponent. That could change if players voluntarily put themselves on webcams and allow themselves to be seen while playing.

Still we see some potential problems with the idea. One, online poker players would have to actually get dressed and clean themselves up a little. That should go over big.

Second, if they don’t — well, this could be horrible.

The site comes from a Slovakian company, Tom Horn Enterprise, which despite being named after a famous cowboy and a 1980 Steve McQueen film, may not be entirely geared up to handle American (and English speaking) players. We’ll let them describe their site to you themselves, completely unedited.

“From today the poker online will not be the same as it used to be. All that what once differed poker from its orignal nature thanks to which it was popular in the whole world and played by all social and national groups is now finally created thanks to modern technologies of the 21st century. You dont need to travel anymore, to meet real poker player and play real poker. That poker by which the art to control your emotions is one of the most important conditions to win. That poker by which you need to use all your senses and not only the a calculator.”

The lesson here — never trust those translation programs.

Still, the European version of cardplayer.com reports that the site’s organizers are targeting central European players, though players from around the world can join. The site uses the Adobe Flash platform and works on Macs and PCs, but use of a webcam is not mandatory.

If it catches on, expect poker sites serving the U.S. to take notice.

Tags: Online Poker

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.