Access & limits
PokerWorks Developer Platform is in beta. Developers can create an account, create a test key, and start calling the calculation API with free credits. Some live, billing, webhook, embed, and management capabilities require the right project configuration, scopes, rate limits, usage controls, or service-account permissions before they are visible or usable.
Good-fit use cases
- Club or league operator automating tournament setup.
- Partner or creator embedding an approved spectator surface or result page.
- Server-side workflow that creates rooms, schedules tournaments, receives webhooks, or exports results.
- Poker publisher embedding calculators in content.
- Tool builder needing reliable ICM, payout, blind, chip, or equity calculations.
- Agents and assistants that need exact poker math instead of guessed numbers.
Free tier and going live
- New accounts start with free credits and a test environment for integration.
- Successful calls draw down credits. Validation and auth failures are never charged.
- Stripe-backed billing is planned for paid usage, but paid-flow launch proof is still in progress. Until your account or project is enabled for paid usage, beta access is free-credit or manually provisioned.
- Usage and remaining balance are visible any time in the console and via
GET /api/v1/usage.
Fair use and limits
To keep the platform healthy for everyone, the calculation API enforces:
- per-account rate limits and per-request compute budgets;
- payload and iteration caps on calculation endpoints;
- fail-closed metering — when credits or limits are exhausted, requests return a clear, machine-readable error rather than silently degrading.
Management-plane writes are also bounded. Test-mode PokerDeck Room automation is self-serve for scoped management tokens, with explicit quotas for active rooms, non-archived tournaments, and concurrent published or scheduled tournaments. Live room and tournament writes require product access, allowed origins, plan entitlement, billing or receipt proof, hosted-runtime quota, usage metering, and support audit before they can incur live hosted-runtime cost.
Out of scope
These are deliberately not part of beta self-serve APIs today:
- Real-money gambling infrastructure.
- Solver or GTO strategy advice ("call/fold" recommendations).
- Public hand-history ingestion.
- Raw hosted-table state, action submission, shuffle/deal, private cards, or settlement authority.
- Certified custom clients, bot seats, arenas, player management, standalone lobby management APIs, ring games, and waitlists.
Automating the console (projects, keys, usage) and receiving tournament webhooks are available through scoped management tokens and project configuration — see Automation & management and Webhooks.
Acceptable use
PokerWorks is social, play-money poker. The calculation API is infrastructure for builders, not for operating real-money gambling. Play-money posture does not waive player-protection, moderation, fair-play, bot-disclosure, economy, or privacy controls; integrations must follow the policy attached to the brand, room, tournament, embed, or future certified protocol they use. Accepting the developer terms at sign-up is required to create a key.
Public reads, widgets, exports, examples, recipes, SDK/CLI/MCP tooling, and brand references are also bounded by the canonical Public Data Use And Brand Rules. Browser-callable data is not permission to scrape first-party pages, resell hand histories, train models on private room data, expose support-only evidence, or imply unsupported PokerWorks/PokerDeck partnership.