Poker Writer
Los Angeles poker player Derek Kwan introduced a new way to gauge poker skill with his EV1 Poker. He hopes the app can help lessen the stigma of gambling around poker while bringing more players into the game.
EV1Poker.com, which he compares to Chess.com, promotes itself as a way for players to quantify their skill levels without having to fork over a lot of money. Players on EV1 Poker can do so by building their “PSkill” by playing free poker against players in their skill range.
PokerScout caught up with Kwan to discuss how everything has gone with his new program in the couple of weeks since its release on March 18.
What Does EV1 Poker Hope to Address?
Kwan talked about why he decided to make EV1 Poker and the role he believes it can play in the poker world.
Inclusiveness, he noted, is tough to find in a business that, by its very nature, hunts the inexperienced. That creates a fundamental problem when it comes to finding new players and growing the game. Such players need a space to learn and play in a way that mimics real-money poker without incurring the risk of immediately going broke. That, after all, might be the quickest way to turn a person off from poker.
Poker has never reached the ‘escape velocity’ it truly deserves, not even during the Moneymaker boom. We need more levers to get casual fans interested in the game, and it’s intimidating for many to wager money, and free-to-play games are just awful.
Kwan made the comparison to other popular strategy games which have exploded in popularity in recent years:
So I wanted to build something on top of other massively successful competitive strategy games, like video games and chess. And by introducing poker’s version of ELO, you can now see how good players really are, instead of trying to guess someone’s actual profit on Hendon.
In his X post about EV1 Poker, Kwan noted that poker tournament results can mislead. After all, poker “winnings” can actually mask a net loss. A player’s buy-ins remain unknown. Even they might not have the full picture of their results.
Removing the Stigma of Gambling From Poker
Kwan also aims to use EV1 Poker to move poker closer to a strategy game rather than a gambling activity. This is particularly important as many state and national governments debate poker’s place in the world amid continued gambling expansion.
While gambling has gained wider acceptance in the U.S., the same is not true in other nations and cultures. Thailand recently reiterated its ban on poker after seeming to soften its stance. Online poker operators pulled out of India after the government passed a sweeping anti-online gaming bill.
I hope EV1 Poker can get poker out of the stigma of a gambling activity and into the same realm of esports, where we truly belong. This is where we get true public acceptance, big sponsors and sponsored events, and that escape velocity we always deserved.
The casual poker player, he noted, is the key factor.
Step one is to get the attention of casual fans the same way Chess.com has done for chess.
How Well Has EV1 Poker Worked in its First Two Weeks?
Kwan said he was “blown away” by the initial sign-ups, with 137 users and 166 games. Growth has been steady since the initial spike.
I didn’t know what to expect when I launched this. I truly believe in the vision, but I am combining multiple worlds and hoping that it ‘works’.., I’m encouraged by the participation in ranked games and the high visits to stats pages!
The founder of EV1 Poker got into the weeds a little bit when explaining the first things he had to fix. He immediately noticed how differently he’d have to approach tweaking the skill rankings when compared to a game like chess. After all, winning a chess game usually reflects some level of skill, or at least a lack of skill in the opponent. A poker win can sometimes be attributed purely to variance.
How, then, would Kwan bridge that gap with his game design?
I had to tweak PSkill multiple times right before launch. Poker is such a different skill game compared to anything else due to variance. I had dial Mu and Sigma, I was misusing PSkill for tiers at one point. I had to hide PSkill for your first five games because the values were too jumpy. Since launch, though, I’ve tried to leave it alone, and it’s mostly looked okay distribution-wise, actually.
Day one was the busiest day of my life. I worked from 8 a.m. until 4 a.m. straight. So many bug fixes and tweaks (thanks to the community for reporting them all!).
Since then, Kwan has worked on adding new features to the site. Recent additions include six-max tables and a PSkill leaderboard.
Kwan is striving to create an arena that will properly showcase poker as “the true king of strategy games.” He believes there’s space in the market for a game offering a transition point between free poker and real-money poker, one he said operates “parallel” to the latter. Time will tell if he’s right, and whether EV1 Poker fills that niche.
