Phil Galfond Defends Controversial RunItOnce Policy

Running It Onwards

As Phil Galfond’s pet project, the RunItOnce online poker room gains momentum, he has put out the first in a series of press releases which will act as apologia for the decisions made by the dev team.

This first missive lays out some of the company philosophy before getting to the juicy deets.

“When we started researching and debating our policies, it became clear quite quickly that no matter what we decided, many of you would be disappointed.” So expect infuriation... Or total vindication. 

Either way Galfond has plenty of verbiage to lay out the whys and wherefores in his post.

Penalties for HUDs

This first post deals with the HUD policy, which is: NO HUDS. The main reason is to level the playing field between pro and neophyte. 

There are three ways Galfond is going after the illicit tech. One making it hard to use with is unspecified measures for catching and harsh punishments for them when nailed by the HUD rozzers.

To further disincentivise the use of HUDs RunItOnce have greatly reduced their value with two other policies.

Anonymous Tables Done Right

One of the big features will be anonymous tables. Rather than stripping the game of humanity by issuing numbers reminiscent of The Prisoner, instead you are simply assigned a random first name and initial for your session at a given table.

Right away that snatches the value of anything but the most basic player stats. 

And if thats not enough, many of those stats are made availiable (sort of) in RunItOnce’s other innovation…

...Dynamic Avatars

Your avatar, and those of the players around you will alter depending on your play. Play tight and your avatar will fall asleep, go nuts and his eyes will start to spin. In this way a kind of intuitive sense of a players image is conveyed.

“When you play live poker, you can see the tight guy playing on his phone the whole time or the angry drunk guy ready to tilt off his chips.” writes Galfond. “Dynamic Avatars bring a similar feel to our tables.”

That’s what we’ve got from Phil so far. For more detail read his post in which he says:

"We want people to enjoy playing, to be treated fairly, and to feel safe, comfortable, and welcome.”

Do you think RunItOnce will help acheive that? Let us know in comments.