Online Poker in a Document

Over the winter holidays, I found some time to work on improving my poker game, reading a couple great books and then applying their theories into practice. While there is no substitute for playing in a casino or at someone’s house, one of the quickest ways to get into a game is to play online poker. There are hundreds of platforms out there, and after playing on a few I thought it would be a fun learning experience to create my own, but with a twist: what if you could have a doc that lets you play poker? Our goal at Coda is to precisely to facilitate that: creating docs as powerful as apps (with the help of formulas, not code), so I set out on an attempt. Read on to see the result and go behind the scenes.

Without further ado, here’s the doc: coda.io/@osv/poker (open on a desktop for the best experience). Get a game going, and it will look something like this:

No team of engineers behind it. No long release cycle or lots of code to maintain. And while there are also no pleasant poker table graphics or pretty animations when someone bets, at the end of the day, this whole game is really just a super-document put together by a single hobbyist with some free time over a few days.

So what did it take? If you’ve used Coda before, you’ll likely be familiar with some of these concepts. But if not, I hope to show that creating apps and games like this…