Say Hello to Ricochet Poker

In the mid-2000’s, I launched a campaign to sell an actual casino game to an actual casino. After fifteen years, I am getting very, very close.

Yesterday I learned that Galaxy Gaming, the distributor of Ricochet Poker, now has a tentative deal to start a trial run at the Stratosphere on January 28. This is a wonderful and necessary next step, and of course I’m terrified that everything will go wrong.

This is a recap of how we got here, hopefully without too much stressing about what will happen next.

I Play Poker.

I have been a poker player since I was five years old. My grandmother (on my father’s side) taught me how to play five card draw, and my grandfather (on my mother’s side) taught me to play license plate poker. You must know the rules to the former, but the latter is a highway game where each player chooses a license plate from cars you’re passing, and treats it as a poker hand. You choose the car before you can read the plate, and you play for a nickel a pop. And if you’re my grandfather (on my mother’s side), you drive fast enough to pass pretty much everybody on the road.

In the early 90’s, my wife and I shared a house, and a dealer’s choice poker game, with comic artists Phil and Kaja Foglio. It was a weekly game that had moved with Phil from Chicago, where it had run for decades. His collection of amusing and strange poker variations became the book Dealer’s Choice, co-penned by Phil Foglio, myself, and game master Mike Selinker.

I’ve run my own weekly poker night since then, meeting with the same cast of characters for the last 25 years. I also played online for years, worked on several poker-related books and games, and I still play poker frequently in Las Vegas. I even cashed in a 6000-player WSOP bracelet event, alongside fellow poker player and game designer Shawn Carnes.

In fact, I play many kinds of casino games and love them all. I was a profit-making Blackjack counter in the 90’s, I teach gaming math with games like craps and roulette, and I love slots so much that I’m glad I can play them on my phone.

I Invent Games.

Not a lot of game designers enjoy working on casino games, but I have a passion for it. These games have to be effortlessly simple, yet rich with surprises. And yes, it’s hard to hold a game like roulette to the standard of “rich with surprises,” but it has the gravitas of seniority.

There are dozens of lightweight gambling games in my oeuvre, most of which were given away for free because there’s really nothing there to sell. Not even counting the hundred or so poker variations I’ve invented, I’ve made dice games, card games, and even “drawing stones from a bag” games.

Pairs is one of my favorites in this space. It’s what I’d call a “pub game,” which is in the gambling family, but not a “casino” game because everyone has the same job. There isn’t a house dealer who plays by different rules and has a built-in advantage, as in a game like Blackjack. Poker also fits on the “pub game” side of that divide.

I was the lead designer on the Fable II Pub Games, a set of three original games within Fable II that filled the niches of slots, craps, and blackjack. And recently I created a fantasy gambling game with Sonia Lyris called Rochi, which will be published by King of the Castle.

“This is a Swag Show.”

In 2003 I attended my first Global Gaming Expo, G2E. This is the casino gaming industry’s biggest trade show, held every October in Las Vegas. I went with some industry friends, who explained that it was imperative to hit every booth on the first day, because that’s when everyone still had cool swag. This, they told me, is a swag show.

Fifteen years later, the show is not as swag-heavy. There are more logo pens and chocolates, and fewer card decks, mini slot machines, inflatable flamingos, and actual sports cars. The show has gone through a few contractions with the rise and fall of the economy, and with the apparent unwillingness of millennials to take up gambling. This in turn might be attributable to the ubiquity of games on cell phones, or to the fact that casino executives have been screwing down the odds for the past twenty years.

Anyway, my first experience at G2E was illuminating and swaggy, and I played a dozen or two really horrible new table games. This made me want desperately to make a good one. There was obviously a lot of money to be made, and of course I also wanted to tackle a problem that seemed impossibly hard. Not necessarily the design itself, but the entire selling-the-game process.

After that I went to G2E almost every year, and I learned a lot about the industry. They don’t really understand what a game designer does. It’s not a job title they use. A slot machine project has a producer, an artist, and a math guy. A new table game has a graphic artist and a patent lawyer. It’s as if you took the design-focused but low-budget world of hobby games, passed it through the pinhole lens of the computer games industry, and projected an exactly opposite image on the silver-coated plate of casino games.

Also, intellectual property is the premium commodity. You need not just an idea, but an ironclad idea. Trademarks and patents are the bones of the industry. G2E is basically a gigantic patent lawyer cage match, with gaggles of attorneys doing Sorkinesque walk-and-talks through every aisle, trying to prove whose game with pachinko in it violates whose patent of using pachinko in a gaming device. (Hint: idiots, pachinko was already a gaming device.) One high-ranking executive told me that if I showed him a game without a patent, it was his literal job to steal it from me.

Getting a patent was hard enough in the 2000’s. At that point it was just expensive. By the mid-2010’s, the patent office basically wasn’t issuing any new patents for game mechanics, because they were getting sick of it. But we’re jumping ahead.

Send in the Sharks!

During this period, Mike Selinker and I were creating lots of games with our design studio Lone Shark Games, and doing fairly well. So we decided to take a crack at the casino game business. I continued going to G2E and talking to friends in the industry, and we made a few games to pitch, including Red Baron and Palomino Poker.

Regardless of the strengths or weaknesses of these games, we just couldn’t break through the crust of the industry. It seemed like an old boy’s club where you had to be someone’s brother-in-law to make a sale. We weren’t willing to invest the cash to set up a booth at G2E, or get patent or math certification for an unsold game, so we just took our lumps, posted our games online, and went back to the drawing board.

The prevailing opinion is that the only new games that will succeed aren’t new at all, but are either variations on slots (which I’m not as interested in making, since I don’t make software), or side bets for Blackjack. These side bets are easier to design, easier to place, and they have the benefit of adding a high-value “sucker bet” to a traditional game that people already know. This workflow is the easiest for everyone along the chain. But it leads to very little innovation in the casino game space.

A few years later, I had an almost-success with a game called 1921 Blackjack, where the dealer always has 19. A friend of a friend, who was a patent holder and marketer of his own poker variant, seemed like he had some traction in the industry. We got as far as filing for a patent, and then the project seemed to disappear, probably from a lack of interest from casinos and distributors. I do literally wonder where it is now.

And Now, Ricochet Poker

In about 2014, I started working on the game that would eventually become Ricochet Poker. The core concept took everything I had learned about making a new casino game, and blended it into a hobby gamer’s version of poker. It’s actually a derivation of “no peek” poker, which I have always hated because some poor soul always has to call a lot of bets before ever seeing their first card.

In no-peek (and related games, like Night Baseball), players receive all their cards face down, and can’t look at them. One player turns up one card, and there is a betting round. The next player turns over cards until they have a better hand than the first player, and there is another betting round. And this goes on, until people realize how awful this is.

There is lots of room for improvement here. Since you can’t look at them, your facedown cards don’t strictly need to be in your possession until they are turned face up, so they might as well stay in the deck. This feels different, but mathematically it’s the same, and it makes dealing easier. Also, I think players should get at least one upcard, so they know a tiny bit about their hand, and the game can start in a random place. And finally, people who haven’t seen their cards shouldn’t have to pay anything. The betting structure of poker really doesn’t work for no-peek.

To accelerate my game, I reduced each player’s decisions to just one action: you get two cards, and can decide to pay for the next three. There’s no betting round at all, just a series of opportunities for players to opt in. To improve the tension of the game (and the fairness of positions) I pass the action to the low hand rather than to the left.

All this game needed was a variant rule for the dealer to give the house some kind of advantage, and it was ready to be a casino game. I took the idea of spreading the dealer’s hand face up at the start from Palomino Poker, which I think is a very strong element of that game. If you’re used to a game like blackjack, where you have to make decisions without knowing the dealer’s hand, this feels like a huge advantage. Just like it does in Double Exposure Blackjack, where the dealer’s starting hand is faceup.

Almost every rule in Ricochet Poker is designed to feel like an advantage for the player: You act with full knowledge of the dealer’s hand; the dealer actually folds if her hand is too good; you get bonus money for catching straights and higher, even if you don’t win the pot; and the house doesn’t even take a rake. I’ll leave it for you to puzzle out where the house gets its advantage.

Let’s Sell This Thing.

For two years I carried Ricochet Poker in a satchel at G2E, showing it to anyone I could. I filed a provisional patent application, so I had some tiny amount of protection. And I had my friend Joe, a casino math pro, run solid numbers on the game so I could fine-tune the rules and feel good about the odds.

I got a generally positive response to the demos, along with a lot of “how does the house make money?” but I still could not make a deal. Some people said their hands were tied; they couldn’t accept my game because they had so many more, and they needed to see field data to get over that hump. Of course, I can’t get that data without a trial, and I can’t get a trial without a distributor, so this was an absurd catch-22.

Then one day, a friend at a computer game developer told me he needed a new casino game for a new multi-game package, and Ricochet Poker became Queen’s Sea Poker, part of a delivery for Princess Cruise Lines. At last I had a tiny foot in a tiny door. While they did purchase the rights to the game for that one project, the deal was that if they wanted to spread the game for real, they had to license it from me.

This almost happened. In November 2018 I flew to Fort Lauderdale to get on a cruise ship, teach the casino staff how to deal the game, and then step off before it left port. It was a lovely boat. I would have liked to spend a week on board. They had even offered me that option, but it was the same week as a trade show that I could not miss.

That was the Cutting Edge Table Game Show, where I met the agent who would eventually sell this game. This is a tiny and extremely expensive trade show, focusing exclusively on table games and the people who install them. I had been going for a couple of years now, still with my game in my satchel, still failing to get anyone to buy it. But I did make some good contacts, including someone who had sold a game to Princess.

Casino entrepreneur Mike Silver was pitching his new game Red and Black, working at a small developer that actually admitted that they could use some design help. I fixed their game at the show, and they played it my way for the rest of the event, getting good responses. So they took my card and we caught up afterwards.

At first I did some consulting work for Mike, on games he was already marketing. Then in the summer of 2018 I was granted a real live patent for Ricochet Poker. Understand that at this point, a new casino game had almost zero chance of this. So kudos to my lawyer Dustin for somehow making this happen.

Shortly after this, Mike Silver and I decided to dedicate our energy to marketing Ricochet. By that November, we were exhibiting the game at the Cutting Edge show, in a room with nineteen other new games.

We won the silver medal in the “best of show” contest, which I think was the unintended consequence of having two people named “Silver” in the booth. Next time I go, I’m taking a game with “gold” in the name. Anyway, the gold medal winner earned a field trial in six casinos. The silver medal got me a silver medal and an invitation to try harder next year.

Following that show, it still took Mike and me nine months, several false starts, and a lot of very ugly contract negotiation to finally make a sale. We signed with Galaxy Gaming just in time for them to show the game at their booth at G2E 2019.

And Now What?

Now… we wait. After years of trying to sell this baby, I have to watch how it gets along without me. I can’t even play it in the casino, since I’m the inventor.

Ricochet Poker actually has a baby brother, Ricochet Poker II. RPII started as a separate game called “Heat,” but they were so similar that I packaged them together under the same brand. This association can be a blessing and a curse. Galaxy actually bought the rights to both games for one low price.

Ricochet Poker II is what the industry designates a “Class II” game, which includes games like bingo and normal poker: the players compete against each other and not against the house. Ricochet I is Class III, because it has a house player. (The distinction is more complicated than that, but I’m not going into it here.) RPII is a similar game but players make more decisions, and it could be successful in a poker room. Ricochet Poker itself is designed for the Blackjack pit.

As I mentioned at the top, I just learned that Ricochet Poker will start a field trial at the Stratosphere at the end of January. So if you’re in Vegas in February, I hope you’ll stop by and enjoy it. Loudly.