[_dave_]

[ QUOTE ]
Tuffness,

I didn't read anything except the OP cause I'm sure it's full of garbage posts, but do you explain how this site would stay afloat?

[/ QUOTE ]

OK, I am not Tuff himself - but here is an ill-conceived and likely badly flawed idea of how such may work...

IIRC Rakefree is a requirement for running legal homegames in the USA, this is the primary motivation - legal poker in the "Land of the Free"

Firstly, there is no "site" that must stay afloat.. this rake-free "homegame network" runs on similar principles to those of CounterStrike games - i.e anyone anywhere can host a table, and anyone anywhere is free to join.

There is at maybe a central payment processor / cashier / bank. This may be operated on a cleared funds only / cash basis, to avoid penalty of charge backs. This may be a central authority - or preferably it is greatly distributed... the host of a "bank" could potentially make money... this is probably the hardest part of the operation to solve. Game security could be implemented on a trust system... If the "bank" that holds your money distrusts the server running the games, no funds allocated, you cannot sit. EDIT: Maybe, one could use real banks - nothing illegal here, after all? /EDIT.

A Central game list is not required, game servers can be run with a p2p style ability to query their neighbors and so on - you fire up a server, once it connects to the "homegame network" it can discover home games that are running across the planet. Similar to Tor / FreeNet. Maybe a tracker style sysstem like torrent would be better, who knows at this point.

And so on. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

There is a lot of stuff in Ray Bonnert's "Honest Holdem" bot posts hidden among the spam, techniques that could be used to verify the integrity of the deal in an untrusted network etc.

I am fairly sure this could be implemented very soon for play money.. the real problem is the payments processing, and the trust required therein [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]