What is verifiable poker dealing?
Verifiable dealing is online poker where every deal can be checked mathematically instead of taken on trust. The deck is sealed — committed with a cryptographic hash — before a card is dealt, public randomness nobody controls is mixed in, and once the hand ends anyone can recompute every card and compare it with what was dealt.
How a sealed deck works
In a traditional online poker room, the operator's server shuffles the deck, knows every card, and simply promises not to misuse that knowledge. A sealed deck replaces that promise with cryptography.
- Before the hand, the room publishes a cryptographic commitment — a hash — to the secret seed that will determine the deck, one hand ahead, and anchors it in a transaction on a public blockchain.
- The deck is derived from that seed, each player's own seed and a public randomness beacon that only publishes after the commitment, so nobody — the house included — gets to choose or rearrange the cards.
- Your hole cards are sent only to your own browser. When the hand ends the secret seed is revealed, and anyone can recompute every card that was dealt and compare it with the hand.
Why it matters
The best-known scandals in online poker history involved insiders with access to hole-card data playing against unsuspecting opponents. Every conventional poker site still relies on the same architecture that made those scandals possible: a server that sees everything and staff you have to trust.
A sealed deck takes the cards out of anyone's hands. The order is fixed by a commitment made before the deal and by randomness published after it, so the house cannot pick or change the cards — and a hand that didn't match its commitment would be visible to everyone, not just to the operator.
How SolPoker implements it
SolPoker seals every deck one hand ahead: the commitment is shown on the table before the hand is dealt and written to Base, your own client seed (generated in your browser — rotate it whenever you like) and the drand public randomness beacon are mixed in at deal time, and the seed is revealed the moment the hand ends. Open any finished hand's Verify link, or download the standalone offline verifier, to recompute the deal yourself.
Your bankroll gets the same treatment. Chips are USDC held in on-chain vaults — deposits and withdrawals settle on public blockchains you can inspect yourself.