When our previous boss, once among the top-ranked poker players in the world, set out to develop an Online Multi-Player Poker Experience involving real money and a global presence, he called us.

The mission of Tribeca Tables was to develop the sophisticated software solution needed for a state-of-art poker experience, and then resell, or rebrand their software to the largest gaming brands in Europe and Asia. Online gambling was, and still is, illegal in the United States. Santoriello Studios was brought in from the very beginning. We helped name the company, brand the company, and design the entire user experience for the service.

First, the name… our client lived in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City and was one of three (Tri) individual partners. We suggested naming the company Tribeca Tables – it had a masculine, bold sound, that flowed very well and we thought would appeal to the majority of players – men. Once the client agreed to the name, they were able to go out and raise money, and we got to work on designing the poker table environment that was key to the success of the company.

The mission for this task demanded that we size-up the competition and design a poker table capable of handling multiple games (Texas Hold Em, Omaha, etc), and rebranding by multiple companies. We decided to challenge ourselves and the company, breaking out of the square, 90 degree world of most gaming experienced at the time. You will notice each of the player’s cards is rotated 5 degrees in either direction, the table is oval, and the cards adhere to the rotation of a particular seat giving the game a much more organic, natural feel. We also worked with the software developers to layer each card and chip stack, allowing us to give a more natural sense of perspective, regardless of their angle of degree or rotation. It was a complex way to display the game sprites, but the company’s success tells us it was worth the effort. After we solidified the rebranding capabilities of the table and the table design, we worked to create the logo design, and the rest of the gaming software.

We can see in the screen shots, there is a lot more to the software besides the table design. We worked with the client and their software developers to ensure the entire user experience was top notch, adding a chat area to the welcome screen, a buddy system to alert users their friends were logged in, and creating a consistent, highly detailed look and feel to every screen. Also of note, the screen shots depict our rebranding efforts, illustrating the Victor Chandler brand in the upper left.

We designed 10 different chip denominations in 4 different positions, and 5 different sets of card positions and sizes for both Texas Hold Em and Omaha, equalling 226 individual cards. The logo, every poker chip, and every playing card were designed in Adobe’s Illustrator, which creates resolution independent graphics. This allowed us to reuse these graphics to create other promotional materials when marketing the service to branding partners, and also allowed the branding partners to reuse the graphics when they marketed the service to their communities.

Tribeca Tables was a very successful company, not only helping many branding partners expand their communities, but eventually selling the company to a larger competitor for tens of millions of dollars. That was a happy day!