The Game Developers Conference will be held in San Francisco from March 18-22, 2019. To commemorate the GDC, we will highlight two gaming patents during the conference.
U.S. Patent No. 10,157,521 B2 (‘521), issued on December 18, 2018, for “Identification of Side Pot Participants in Poker Game.” The inventors are Jacob Moore of Alameda, California, Stacey Adams, Justin Rouse, and Theodore Marston, all of San Francisco, California. The applicant and assignee is Zynga, Inc. of San Francisco, California, the social networking game developer company. The ‘521 specification describes various embodiments for . The stated novelty is:
In poker, when side pots are created, players may be confused because the players may not understand well who are are the players participating in a side pot created during a hand as a result of a player going all in (‘521 specification, col. 1, lns. 36-40).
The ‘521 claims are directed to the methods of providing, detecting, and creating the gaming environment for an online poker game where “an individualized view configuration for the first player of the side pot based on spatial relationships of the player participating in the side put with respect to the first player, the one or more servers interface with the game database to map respective icons of the players participating in the side pot to positions within the individualized view configuration that correspond to their respective spatial relationships with respect to the first player.”
Figure 1 illustrates the gaming environment of this invention:
Source: U.S. Patent No. 10,157,521 B2, Dec. 18, 2018, to Jacob Moore, Stacey Adams, Justin Rouse, and Theodore Marston (inventors); Zynga, Inc. (applicant/assignee)
The International Patent Classifications are G07F (coin-freed or like apparatus, namely, coin-freed apparatus for hiring articles; coin-freed facilities or services).
The gaming industry is a $36 billion one, and Zynga is one of the largest gaming developers in the world. Zynga focuses on mobile gaming and social networking platforms, and some of its highest-grossing products include the FARMVILLE® family of games, ZYNGA POKER®, and WORDS WITH FRIENDS 2®.
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