A patent on a poker game?

It's almost time for another patent and intellectual property auction from Ocean Tomo, and the gem in the catalog this time is a patent on a poker game.

Invented by Anthony Cabot, the game, informally called Multiway Poker, involves dealing 25 cards facedown in a 5x5 array. You then make hands out of the rows. In all, there are 12 hands in each deal: five vertical rows, five horizontal rows and two diagonal ones. There are a ton of variations, but the most common is draw poker.

The patent, No. 7,007,953, has an expected value of $75,000. It can be licensed to makers of video-gaming machines, but also to casinos or card rooms, in case they want to add it to their repertoire.

Five by five plus diagonal

(Credit: Multiway Poker)

You can try it out here. Don't worry. They aren't charging royalties. It's a bit confusing, but the number of combinations is sort of fun. The auction takes place on October 24 and 25 in Chicago.

Patents are reigning boogeymen in the tech world. Companies and individuals regularly get in a tizzy about people who are getting rich off of allegedly flimsy patents. It is true that patent claims have increased in recent years. But when pushed, it's rare for a company to say its own patents are flimsy. That's the other guy. When companies do open up their patent portfolios for free licensing, the free patents are often not the very valuable ones.

Part of the reason that patent reform has taken so long is that the subject is painted in shades of gray.

Ocean Tomo is trying to create a more fluid market for patents by holding periodic auctions involving a wide range of patents. The auctions typically result in a few million in sales. They even hired Charlie Ross, an auctioneer from Britain who can be seen on a TV show in Britain called Flog It! (on camera?) as well as Antiques Roadshow.

Approximately 76 lots of intellectual property will be auctioned off. Some of the patents to be sold include one that promises to update electronic clocks without human intervention (estimated value $100,000-plus), a patent for cleaning up abandoned shopping carts on Web sites estimated value $2 million) and one for Raman optical amplifiers. Iomega is also going to sell off a patent for formatting low capacity storage devices.

Some of the patent portfolios sell for millions at the auction. Lest you think they are all so-called "patent trolls," the sellers have included the University of California and IBM.

In past auctions, Ocean Tomo has auctioned off stills and video from the classic rock era, including a snippet of Keith Richards getting electrocuted, a Jimi Hendrix song catalog and several patents for flat panels.

[MSSlayer]

More proof

That software patents are out of control. These patent trolls are just hanging themselves.

Copyright is all that is needed to protect programs.

[sanenazok]

Proof tends to uhm prove

What does the sale of a game have to do with software patents? If you looked at this patent actually you would know it's for a method of playing a poker game and not for software*. I guess you jumped to conclusions because it's played on a computer. Also how does the sale of the game "prove" that software patents are out of control.

Just trying to figure it out.

*It's not entirely your fault since C|Net has the patent number wrong. It's not 7,000,953 but rather 7,007,953.

[sanenazok]

Patent Number is Wrong

Don't mean to gripe unnecessarily but in looking this over I found that the poker patent reg. no is 7,007,953 not 7,000,953 that's listed in the story.

Just in case someone's interested in looking at the actual patent...

[wylbur]

I got that for a birthday present

in 1979, a plastic holder for playing that very idea, maybe it was
with seven by seven cards.