Pokerstars wins fast-fold US patent
Poker giant set to gain Zoom Poker patent next week after five year battle placing rival fast-fold games in jeopardy
Pokerstars finally succeeded in its attempt to gain a US patent for its fast-fold poker variant Zoom Poker late last week, bringing to an end a process dating back more than five-years.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) agreed to award Pokerstars a patent for the fast-fold game after the poker giant once again resubmitted its applications earlier this year.
The award follows a number of unsuccessful applications with the original patent submission dating back as far as December 2008, prior to Pokerstars 2012 acquisition of Full Tilt.
As part of the acquisition Pokerstars obtained the rights to Full Tilt’s ‘573’ patent application after Full Tilt assigned its intellectual property rights to Pokerstars.
The patent will have no impact outside of the US but Bill Gantz, a US gaming lawyer at law firm Dentons, said the patent could be applied to real-money and free-to-play versions in the US, such as that offered by Zynga.
Gantz said he was surprised the USPTO decided to grant Pokerstars the patent considering the number of previous application rejections.
“It is truly surprising here that the Pokerstars application survived multiple wholesale rejections,” he said.
“It is also surprising that the patent issued over prior art cited by the examiner teaching taking a fold out of turn,” he added. “The amendments which allowed this patent to issue should seem obvious to the entire poker industry, and there should be ample grounds for vigorously challenging this patent.”
The USPTO rejected a number of earlier patent applications after having judged its system of automatically allocating players to a new table as being similar to that of earlier patent applications from other parties.
In February 2013, Pokerstars agreed to modify its claims and withdraw all 51 previous claims and submitted 53 new ones which focused on the ability to assign players to a new table following a fold “made out of turn” and “while the first-hand is still active”.
Despite these resubmissions also being rejected, a meeting held on 31 March 2014 saw an USPTO examiner propose that Pokerstars amended folding “out of turn” to folding “when gameplay is at a position of another one of the first plurality of players”.