Aces Royal has created the world's first mobile real-money poker game, a product highly regarded in mobile gaming circles and apparently by customers, too. The company develops specifically for mobile gaming, and recently launched its new AR3 platform, the fastest in the world, the company says. Peter Karsten tells us more.

Casino International: Peter, tell me about the new technology…

Peter Karsten: We launched our third generation of technology on the 11th June and that really caused the business to take off so thereafter the previous generation was from the 1st December last year and the first generation was from 2004. And if you look at the 2004 product, we were looking at request response times between six seconds and 16 seconds, which for slots is almost acceptable but not quite. For multiplayer poker of course that’s very difficult.

The second generation product enabled us to bring down the request response times down to say three or four seconds, that magnitude which means that we had a commercial product. If you and I were playing poker together on mobile phones then if you raise me it would take me three and four seconds for me to see that you had done so, hence you end up with reasonably quick hands if you do that. At that point in time we decide to invest really heavily into technology around speed.

With the top level handsets now we’re seeing request response times now as low as 0.2 seconds now that starts getting a little bit interesting. If you look at Frank Lampard for example, if Lampard takes a penalty then he kicks at 70 mph. At 70mph it takes 0.4 seconds for him to put the ball into the back of the net from the penalty spot. 0.2 seconds represents 6.25m which is a bit more than half way to the goal keeper. On phones such as the Sony Ericsson K800 and the Nokia 95, we're actually limited by the speed of the LCD in how quick we can display results. It's really quite extraordinary, it's right there at Internet speed.

That has a couple of effects; the first is commercial, of course, which is great. The second is a trust thing, which surprised me. The level of trust you can assign to the gambling experience is really improved. I did not predict this at all. The click-through rates, registration completions, have all gone up a lot since we've done this.

CI: Would you license this super-fast engine out to anyone?

PK: Perhaps in the future, but certainly not yet.

CI: How have the speeds come down so rapidly in such a short time? Is it your technology or is it phone technology advancing too?

PK: I can't go into our technology for obvious reasons, but it is as a result of both of those things.

There's a fair amount of pain we went through to create this. We had a team and we said okay guys, we've got this far – from here, do we slow down research on speed and leave one guy on it moving forward, or do we assign 15 guys to it and try to go forward as far, as fast as we can? So we put 15 guys on it.

Our business differs from most in that we have average revenues per user of £47 per month. If you look at the way people gamble when they use a mobile phone, they gamble for a fixed number of minutes. If you walk into a casino you walk in with a fixed budget. If you walk into a PC-based poker room, you have a budget. In all of those cases, time is variable, but for mobile players the bus might arrive at the station, your partner might come home… This means that the speed of gameplay is directly proportionate to our ability to derive revenue from gameplay. So speed is hugely relevant to us.

CI: Does the speed affect the encryption at all? Is that an issue?

PK: We have to encrypt everything. If you play a game like Roulette, you would need encryption for when you do transaction and account-related things. But the actual play you could have unencrypted, because like in the land-based game you're not exactly being secretive when you place your bets. As long as the security's there on the server-side, the bets can be declared.

For poker that's different. If I were able to sniff out some gateways within your ISPs I might be able to see your cards while playing poker. As this business becomes big, doing that systematically becomes very interesting. Therefore, for multiplayer games, we encrypt everything.

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