The Rust core that deals every hand — what it guarantees, what it covers, and how operators plug into it.
The PokerNode engine is a standalone service written in Rust. It owns table state, deals cards, drives the betting rounds, resolves showdowns and settles pots. It holds no opinion about your front end, your accounts or your payment rails — those are separate services that talk to it.
It ships as a single versioned binary with a pinned checksum, so the exact build running in your environment is the build you audited. Upgrading is replacing one file.
Fifteen poker variants plus BlackJack on one engine: Texas Hold'em full-deck and short-deck, Omaha in four-, five-card and Eight Hi-Lo forms, Stud, Stud Eight Hi/Lo, Razz, London Lowball, Five Card Draw, Single and Triple 2-7 Lowball, Badugi, and the 8-Game and H.O.R.S.E. mixed rotations.
Tables run from heads-up to ten seats depending on the variant, in cash formats and in tournament structures with registration, blind levels and prize distribution.
Game logic is deterministic: the same inputs produce the same hand. Every hand leaves a canonical record, and any completed hand can be replayed street by street from that record — the same mechanism support uses to answer a player dispute and the same one an auditor uses to verify an outcome.
The hand evaluator is also published as a WebAssembly bundle, so an evaluation can be re-run in the browser against the recorded hand without trusting the server's answer.
The engine recovers from a mid-hand crash to a known-safe state and reconciles players who disconnected while a hand was live, rather than voiding the table.
Memory stays flat under sustained transaction volume — the design target is multi-hour tournaments that finish without a restart, not a benchmark that looks good for ten minutes.
Players connect over WebSocket for a live table; spectators read the same stream over Server-Sent Events without holding a seat. Operator backends drive the engine over gRPC — creating rooms, seating players, running tournaments — and a REST surface covers health and administrative queries.
A built-in bot harness fills tables with AI opponents, which is what makes integration testing and load testing possible before a single real player is invited.