I’m Paul Gould, founder of PokerWorks and former CEO of Replay Poker, where I spent years helping build one of the largest social poker communities online. After more than a decade operating real social-poker products at scale, I came to a conclusion that wouldn’t go away.
Online social poker has been an afterthought for two decades. The category has been treated as a marketing funnel for real-money rooms — dressed up in casino skins, slot mechanics, and chip stores. The players who actually love the game — clubs, friend groups, regulars, anyone who turns up week after week — deserve much better than that.
Social poker deserves to be its own thing — a modern experience that does not pretend to be a casino, takes the players seriously, and respects the depth of the game itself.
PokerWorks exists to build that. A modern, transparent poker platform — one shared runtime, one identity, an honest fairness posture, and engineering you can actually verify. Not another casino skin. Not a chip store with slot mechanics. Social poker, rebuilt from first principles by people who genuinely love the game.
Our first product is PokerDeck — a tournament home for clubs, teams, and friend groups, built on the PokerWorks runtime. More products will follow on the same platform, sharing the same identity, the same fairness layer, the same engineering DNA. We’ll say more about each one when it’s ready for players — not before.
We’re just getting started, but the vision is clear: a new generation of social poker, rebuilt the way it should have been all along — one table, one tournament, one community at a time.
