Matt731

(Sorry if this points thing is old news)

We're not going to be betting money. We took a step back on poker and we did something very cool that hasn't been done before. Poker -- and this is one of my pet peeves around casino games on consoles and systems out right now -- was designed for those games based around money. And poker isn't just about money, it's about risk-reward. If there is nothing to risk, then people don't play right. So, that's why blackjack just sucks. After a while those games are just dumb. Because what is the point? It isn't a very fun game in and of itself from a play mechanic standpoint, and if there isn't any money, people stop playing it right. Poker, if there is no money, is then played wrong. People just go all in, all in, all in on every hand, and it's frickin' stupid. If there is no money or nothing to lose, they just ruin the game. If you try to play party or poker stars, I won't play anymore on points. I tried.

So we took a step back and said, OK, this could be a tent pole franchise for us, a huge, huge franchise for us. We have Live. We have all the raw materials, we're going to build a poker game. What are we going to do? So we came up with this concept of virtual consistent bankrole. Virtual consistent bankrole is the concept of, it's not money, but it's a theoretical point system -- but specific to poker. It's not Microsoft points or GameScore, or anything like that. You have three different versions of the virtual consistent bankrole: one for single-player play; one for player-match play, and one for competitive play. And it's tied to your Gamertag. We track how many times you go to the ATM and we actually put you in the negative. You're going to start off with $5,000 or whatever, and it's tied to your profile. You can't lose GamerScore points, but it's tied to your profile and that's permanent. You can go into the negative. So if you choose to be an idiot and go all in, all in, all in, and you lose all your money, typically in these games you go to the ATM and you withdraw another $5,000 and you start over. You can go negative $5,000, negative $10,000, negative $15,000. That will do two things: it will be permanently tied to your GamerTag. It's non-erasable. Ever. The second thing is we have rooms. And the higher stakes rooms have entrée fees. So if you don't have a certain balance in your point account on your Gamertag, you don't get into the higher rooms. And that's where you make all the money. You're going to have to dig yourself out of your negative GamerScore by playing the low-stake rooms and playing well, or you're never going to get out of your negative situation.

It will show when you're in the poker game. You'll have a point balance and when you're in the game you'll see everyone else's virtual bankrole and they can see yours.

Right, so in play-testing we've seen that people actually, suddenly, play right. They play the way they're supposed to play, and they don't go all in unless they have the cards or they really want to go all in.

I found this in the Xbox.com Forums I dont have a link from Ign but I think this post is legit.

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