Online poker in a quantum world

Jordi Castellà‐Roca, Josep Domingo‐Ferrer, Francesc Sebé

S. Abeyratne

Weiliang Zhao, Vijay Varadharajan

Online gambling allows users to participate in mental games and bet over the Internet. It can open new opportunities for casinos to make more money; however, at the same time, there are a lot of security challenges. In this paper, we describe our scheme for secure online gambling and secure mental poker protocols over the Internet based on our previous researches. Our scheme provides both the fairness of online gambling processes and secure linking of the online gambling with payment. A unique link between payments and gambling outcome is provided so that the winner can be ensured to get the payment. The gambling games are generic in our fair online gambling scheme. Mental poker is one of most popular games of online gambling. In this paper, efficient and secure mental poker protocols are provided. These mental poker protocols are based on multiple encryption and decryption of individual cards. These protocols satisfy all major security requirements of a real mental poker. The card salesman has been got rid of and the minimal effect due to collusion has been guaranteed. These protocols are more efficient compared with other known protocols. The strategies of players can be kept confidential with the introduction of a dealer. These mental poker protocols are suitable for implementation in an online card game.

pMichael R Gellerp

Steven A. Bleiler

Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore's Law brings computation and information into the quantum realm. The quantum theory of games concerns the behavior of classical games when played the coming quantum computing environment or when played with quantum information. In almost all cases, the versions of these games afford many new strategic options to the players. The study of so-called quantum games is quite new, arising from a seminal paper of D. Meyer \cite{Meyer} published Physics Review Letters 1999. The ensuing near decade has seen an explosion of contributions and controversy over what exactly a quantized game really is and if there is indeed anything new for game theory. With the settling of some of these controversies \cite{Bleiler}, it is now possible to fully analyze some of the basic endgame models from the game theory of Poker and predict with confidence just how the optimal play of Poker will change when played the coming quantum computation environment. The analysis here shows that for certain players, entangled poker will allow results that outperform those available to players in real life.

Steven A. Bleiler

Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore's Law brings computation and information into the quantum realm. The quantum theory of games concerns the behavior of classical games when played in the coming quantum computing environment or when played with quantum information. In almost all cases, the "quantized" versions of these games afford many new strategic options to the players. The study of so-called quantum games is quite new, arising from a seminal paper of D. Meyer \cite{Meyer} published in Physics Review Letters in 1999. The ensuing near decade has seen an explosion of contributions and controversy over what exactly a quantized game really is and if there is indeed anything new for game theory. With the settling of some of these controversies \cite{Bleiler}, it is now possible to fully analyze some of the basic endgame models from the game theory of Poker and predict with confidence just how the optimal play of Poker will change when played in the coming quantum computation environment. The analysis here shows that for certain players, "entangled" poker will allow results that outperform those available to players "in real life".