Libre Poker
The argument in one paragraph
Online poker is dying of two diseases, and both are business models: the rake, which makes even-matched play a slow donation, and the trust collapse — unauditable shuffles, invisible machines, platforms whose incentive is your losing slowly enough to stay. Libre Poker's answer to both is the same answer: remove the house. No rake, because there is no one to collect it. No trusted dealer — shuffles are committed before play and every hand replays from its seed. No bot paranoia: machines play openly under their own flag, and what's at stake is not a balance but a reputation — signed, replayable, anchored in Bitcoin time, impossible to backdate and impossible to confiscate. The score is the measurement: your rating, and your leak in exact big blinds against equilibrium. Poker where the better player wins, and can prove it.
The invariants
- Rake-free forever. No cut of any pot, under any name. If the project needs money it asks, as lichess asks.
- Libre. All code open source, all specs public, all formats documented. Fork the world.
- No server owns the truth. Matches, ratings, and careers live in signed transcripts anyone can replay. Hosts are conveniences.
- Provable fairness or honest absence. Where a guarantee can't yet be delivered, the gap is stated — never staged.
- Machines are citizens. Declared agents play openly, rated in the same pool, flagged everywhere they appear.
- Identity is a keypair. Pseudonymous by default, portable across rooms, owned by no platform.
- The measurement is sacred. No number appears on a board that a reader cannot recompute from public data.