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Recently there has been lots of new interest in the gambling genre for social games. Playdom is exploring this boat too (based on a comment from their CEO to me at a recent party ).

And today Playfish tweeted about a sneak peak to its new Poker game–Poker Rivals. Here a promo video (great video by the way). The game fan page already has 108 fans. Like its Zynga competitor Texas Hold’em Poker it is a F2P game where you either get chips from the daily lottery or buy chips. Note: in the Zynga game you can no longer buy chips with offers, you can only use real money (a change since the offer scam I think). The Playfish game allows chips in exchange for offers.

Earlier this year Sebastien de Halleux from commented–”Design games as objects of social interaction. Design games to encourage interaction. Get people into experience and back out to social…Game facilitates and creates and encourages those interactions but ultimately is only a channel for the experience.”

Poker Rivals lives up to this by allowing players several ways of expressing emotions socially that the other online Poker games don’t.

You can buy drinks and gifts for other players on your table. You can also tag them according to various categories on how they play.

You can demonstrate misleading emotions. Curiously when I asked a real life poker junkie (who is an avid Farmville player) if he would play online Poker and he said that his fascination with Poker is people’s expressions as they bluff, not something he will be able to see online. In the rounds I played tonight, few seemed to be using these options very much. In any case they do add an emotional element not otherwise present in online Poker.

You can compete with friends for experience points, cash balance, and awards for kinds of hand won.

And finally you can change the location you play poker by buying something fancier like a yatch. No fancy screenshots for this one is payable by Playfish cash only. Chips and experience points do not help here.

So what do you think? Have you played Poker Rivals? What do you think about it compared to other online Poker games?

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