Poker Payment Methods

How many times have we decided to change poker rooms or avoided some of them just because their poker payment methods do not suit us? I can think of at least three of them myself.

An easily enabled deposit and payout system for your game play is a part and parcel of the online poker software from its conception and designing phase itself. A proper plan for incorporating it within the game system is of importance and good poker software companies place a top priority on precisely this. The payment systems are tightly integrated with the gaming system and are referred to as the poker payment methods.

The poker payment methods are integrated with the database and the back office and provide a centralized service for reliable and fast resolution of the player’s payment related needs that include deposit and payouts.

We have integrated API’s with the leading credit card payment methods and the leading e-wallets worldwide. The latest user-to-user payments micro payments, merchant processing and online deposits and payouts are easy and user friendly.

Our poker payment methods are safe and secure and offer the highest level of privacy and security online for our users. State of the art software protects all personal and private data. It does this by encrypting and decrypting the information between commerce servers so that the personal and private data is safely transmitted. All personal information is kept utterly confidential and not given out to third parties.

Apart from the poker deposit and withdrawal methods used for deposit and payouts we also have inter account transfer system that our TM (transaction management) team refers to as IAT.

We have over 25 poker payment methods integrated with our online software.

Poker Database

The poker database is a very important part of the poker gaming system; to monitor and administer the day-to-day operation of a poker room it is a must. Consider the poker database as essentially the common repository of both dynamic data like game records, money transactions etc. and static data like user profile, game properties etc. and it is extensively used by almost every sub-system in the online poker software. The gaming system uses Oracle database.

The poker database has the following salient features:

• The schema is designed so as to keep it flexible, scalable and easy to maintain by keeping the data integrity, performance, normalization and simplicity in mind.
  
• Every primary table in the system has a corresponding log table to keep track of the changes in the master data.
  
• Indexes are chosen carefully to get the better retrieval performance without costing heavily on insertion performance.
  
• The poker database is accessed from applications using what our programmers call as a bit-mechanic JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) Connection Pool API.
  
• Applications query/manipulate the data using stored procedures to keep the data access clean and consistent across all the modules of application, at the same time centralizing all the business logic within the poker database.
  
• The Poker Database has over 300 tables with over 600 stored procedures.
  

A few of the important tables in the Poker Database :

T_USER : This is a primary table which contains user profile details like, account name, password, first & last name, email-id, address and also other essential user information like affiliate id, referrer, last accessed time etc.

T_GAME_LIVE : It records information about every game played on the site like game number, type of table, table name, time, total rake etc.

T_PLAYER : It records game play information like bets, wins, rake contributions etc. of every game of every user.

T_INVESTIGATION : This is the primary table for capturing the poker investigation team’s findings about a user and his activities on the site and helps for fraud and collusion control.

T_Wallet_Transaction : This table records all user’s real money transactions like purchases, redeems, bonuses etc.

T_BONUS_RULE : This primary table which captures various promotional bonus schemes setup in the System.

T_TOURNAMENT : It records details about the every tournament played on the site, like time, type of tournament, table name etc.

The poker database is a highly essential component of the gaming system. It requires a dedicated team to firstly design the poker architecture and the poker database and then manage and maintain it 24/7. It gives absolute inputs to all teams from transaction management, customer service and fraud control as well. If the online poker gaming system has a backbone, it is the poker database.

Poker Directory Service

Moving on to the poker directory service:

The poker directory service assists the game servers to identify and communicate with each other and work in collaboration. It uses RMI (Remote Method Invocation) for the communication. Each server can discover the other server via the directory service and can initiate communication after detection. This is a key component for the development of online poker software.

RMI is a Java application programming interface that performs the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls (RPC).

RPC is when the programmer would write essentially the same code whether the subroutine is local to the executing program, or remote. When the software in question is written using object-oriented principles, RPC may be referred to as remote invocation or remote method invocation.RPC is a popular style for implementing the client-server model used in online poker software. An RPC is initiated by the client sending a request message to a known remote server in order to execute a specified procedure using given parameters. A response then is returned to the client where the application continues along with its process. While the server is processing the call, the client is blocked (it waits until the server has finished processing before resuming execution).

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm (programming style) that uses "objects" – data structures consisting of datafields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs.

The poker directory service is also used for:

§ To remote authenticate the user in case he is already logged in on any other server

§ To load balance with respect to game tables

§ To get the game table and player lists to broadcast to its subscribed users

§ To provide global wait list functionality

The balances and checks in communication and collaboration is carried out by the poker directory service.

Poker Game Server

The Poker Game Server is the most important component of our game system. It hosts the games and also communicates with all other sub-systems in the poker software to provide the necessary functionality to the poker game clients. It runs on the hosting systems that we have in our company locations like Hong Kong, Cyprus and London. The game table management, tournament management, the synchronization, the game logic execution and implementation, data and database management systems and the back office are all managed via the poker game server.

The gaming system can have one or more game servers depending on the traffic. All the game servers work in collaboration. The game server is what they call a hot-plug-able component. This means that a new game server can be added to or removed from the system without disturbing any running servers. An additional game server can be plugged into the system to meet the traffic demand dynamically and the load will get balanced automatically. Likewise, any running server can be shutdown gracefully by rotating the exiting game tables on that poker game server to other servers. This essentially means that the system requires zero maintenance time.

In case of a rare, unexpected crash of a poker game server, the other servers automatically detect this and create the game tables that were hosted by that ill-fated server ensuring the availability of all type of games instantaneously.

The existence of multiple servers is transparent to users. The poker game client software automatically connects to the poker game server on which the user requested game table is hosted.

Our system uses a local director to intelligently balance the traffic of initial connection requests across multiple game servers. Our poker server software is developed in Java.

The communication between the poker client and game server happens using the custom message protocol with peer architecture. Peer is the end point of communication and has the ability to digest the message for further processing. Only the peers at the same level can communicate with each other. There are two server side peers namely GameServer and GameTable and two client side peers namely GameClient and GameTable. GameServer and GameClient form one level whereas GameTable at either end form another level and communicate correspondingly.
Here’s what I am talking about:

Terminology:

Peer : Peer is an end point of communication. It can receive packets from or send packets to a peer at the corresponding level. Each peer is identified by a peer id.

Packet : Packet is set of one or more messages with source and destination peer information.

Message : Message is a primitive piece of information which contains the actual data. Each message is identified by a message id. The basic abstract Message class is generalized to carry a particular piece of information. Currently there are about 1200 messages in the system. There are some general messages which can be used to communicate multiple types of information and some particular ones for particular requests.

At the end of the day, we’re committed to high quality software and our Tech Manager and our server software architect Amit Chaudhary with our extensively qualified team make certain that our poker game server software is among the best there is.

Poker Game Client

Moving from poker architecture, to the poker game client. I thought I would make this a series of blog posts about the different components that make a poker software work. Like other poker players, I obviously took a lot of the features that are offered on online sites for granted. Being a part of the business development team of a top-end software company manufacturing online poker software, I could and decided to delve deeper into the finer aspects of what make it so interesting and different from other software.

The Poker Game Client is the actual downloadable software and it is the front-end of the application that a user uses to connect to the poker game server over the internet (The game server hosts the games and also communicates with all other sub-systems to provide the necessary functionality to the clients).

For instance, our company’s poker game client is available on all versions of windows operating system. The poker client software is developed in a language called VC++. We do have a version in the java language as well :)
Then we have an Installshield Installer (installs any software on Windows platforms) which is used for installation of software. The client will automatically get upgraded with latest any version of the software, if any is available, on connecting to the game server.

The poker game client communicates with game servers using what are referred to as socket connections (Internet sockets constitute a mechanism for delivering incoming data packets to the appropriate application process or thread). Every user initially connects and subscribes to a game server using a virtual game server IP address and gets all periodic updates (like game table information, player lists, general broadcast messages) from that server. As the user chooses to join a particular game table, the poker game client accordingly connects to the game server hosting that game table and lets the user to play on the game table.

In case of internet delays and disconnections, the poker game client automatically retries and connects back to game server and gets the current session re-authenticated by the server, to let the user continue to play from where he left.

The process is fun when you take a perspective from the computer programmer’s point of view. Jayesh Shinde, our poker game client team leader is a 25 year old computer brainiac whiz kid who eats, sits, breathes, sleeps complicated poker game client algorithms and code.