When I find myself speaking about “scalability”, it’s hard not to feel a little like Jack Donaghy from 30Rock in his “synergy” scene with Liz Lemon. Perhaps contrary to the importance and reality of many other business buzzwords though, scalability is vitally important to success in online gaming; both operationally and in technology - and to the latter, 4Poker have prioritized hiring some of the best in the business to deliver on this very ambition.

Scalability in the context of gaming technology is to enable and support organic and non-organic growth, and when executed well, is the speed in which you can do so. An extremely complex regulatory landscape and plethora of opportunities business to business (B2B), ensure that the ability to scale quickly becomes a business imperative, not a nice-to-have.

As is the case with the majority of superstars I’ve worked with in this industry, the average poker player, sports bettor or gamer, would never have heard of them. In itself not unusual, as I doubt you could name your favourite engineer at Google or the best customer service rep at Amazon either.

Let me change that narrative momentarily and introduce you to our recently appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Serge Bourenkov who is backed at 4Poker by some of the best talent in gaming engineering, who readers will meet later in a behind the scenes video series we are preparing in the new year!

In the continued spirit of transparency, and due to many years of developed trust and earned respect, it gives zero cause for concern to put Serge on the pedestal he deserves as the right person to lead our gaming technology vision, and ensure we deliver the best in platform and back-office over the next few years.

Put simply, Serge is one of the smartest and most effective technology architects I’ve interacted with in circa.20 years in business. It pleases me that 4Poker gives him the platform to do things that were much more difficult previously working with a more mature and legacy platform, filled with a lot of technical debt.

The scalability challenge that many of the industry’s leading operators have today is not in the ability to enhance or develop new product, but in the capability of seamless integration of databases, back-offices, server systems and data and gaming ecosystems, and to have multiple 3rd party and proprietary products operating in a coherent way.

The usual constraint and limitation come from operating a “monolithic architecture” after many years of tightly coupled and closely integrated core functions. If it’s all sounding very technical, it’s not really. It’s essentially just very easy to grow a monster after many years of building within and on top of your main technology stack.

Rewind to my thinking and feeling that a proven professional like Serge is likely enjoying the blank canvas that is a start-up. The words modular and decoupled are thrown around in platform development, but I’ve started to see the fruits of his labour already with my own eyes, as our back office team execute on getting a wide range of 3rd party products working together, with a system like Hubspot segmenting customers and talking to the back-office, which is integrated nicely to Zendesk, where a community forum connects quite seamlessly to Confluence and JIRA, as just one example!

I fondly remember Serge’s skill and performance when re-architecting the PokerStars back-office to accommodate Full Tilt Poker players and their accounts, and working with the wider team to solve for many of the biggest challenges to gaming infrastructure, notably multi-jurisdictional platform, mobile and licensing.

Our team all recently sat witness to our Head of Engineering - also steeped with gaming experience -first-hand on his own home laptop and server, increasing the load and activity capability to upwards of 100k players and over 20k tables, it got me very excited to what the team might be able to achieve, and very keen to make them known.

We’ve been reminded very recently by DDOS attacks through to hugely impactful downtimes, on the importance of stability and a robust platform in the industry, so asked Serge to outline his overall development vision for 4Poker;

“As we develop architecture of the new site, we have at our disposal plenty of tools, engines and application frameworks that we didn’t have back when the likes of the PokerStars or 888 platforms were being built. All those things have been developed and battle tested by Internet-scale companies, and we are aiming to utilize their potential to achieve scalability on various fronts:

• Do more with less. Other than spending time and effort building and fine-tuning platform components – focus on delivering features that will delight our players
• Scale system capacity on demand to be able to handle poker events, tournaments and festival series’ of pretty much any size
• Scale up to multiple platforms using cross-platform framework and build a client that works on Android, iPhone and on the web – from the same code base
• Scale out to multiple jurisdictions by embedding into the core of our system the controls that will be required to achieve compliance any jurisdiction we are currently aware of”.

“PokerStars was a great but also a tough school to be leading, where at peak time almost 2,000 poker hands completed every second and biggest tournaments had over 250,000 concurrent players. Liquidity, simply put, is the life of poker, so as we are building a new site, we have constant focus on its performance and stability”, he said.

“We are setting up the platform in a way where the crash of any of the servers the site is running on will cause nothing more other than potentially a few seconds of delay. While this guarantees continuous operation of the site, it also allows us to roll out software upgrades without stopping the site, which I am sure will be appreciated by the players around the world.”

I’ve already seen in my first couple of months at 4Poker the ability to do some small things in the back-office that simply weren’t possible in 15 years previously, but I wanted to ask someone a little closer to the action and product, for their view of the world, and who better than Ryan Kneale, 4Poker’s Head of CX Product Architecture.

Kneale, also a start-up experienced gaming industry veteran of 15 years, shared his own 4Poker experience, which was consistent with what I was seeing, and hearing from our engineering leaders;

“I am confident that we are building a platform where we can be both more agile in adopting new technology to benefit our customers, and that we can manoeuvre ourselves to take advantage of the best in class third party solutions that are out there”, said Kneale.

“We aim to be 3rd party integration friendly and this I would say is a key differentiator for us. With us being a small team to begin with it, is important that we get the tools we need in place quickly and think of the long-term benefits of any technologies we look to implement”, he said.

“If my past experience has taught me anything, it is that in this industry you have to move quickly and efficiently whilst not being short-sighted. Something that is good for today might not be tomorrow and this is a pitfall we want to avoid”, said Kneale.

For us to live up to this goal of truly giving players a seat at our table, and acting on player feedback with implementation, we need to do that from the strongest and most stable, robust and scalable starting place, with the ability to deliver with speed and integrate seamlessly, and thankfully – with the best people in the game.