If you used IRC (maybe Discord?) you could literally script a dealer that dealt you both cards in DM and handles the community cards (depending on the type of poker you wanna play). It would also make it harder to cheat, since it could still know what it dealt and who had the actual winning hand if nobody folded.

The smartass answer is that you link them to a poker site.

The other smartass answer is you do a bunch of cryptographic hashing.

Assuming that you are not going to be cheating, you can have a deck of cards where you mark the back with a random number. You let the other player know which cards are marked with each number (ideally in a way that won’t let you memorize them).

Then you just handle the cards. You shuffle, you pick the cards, and when you pick for the other player, you do not look at the cards, just at the numbers, that you communicate to them.

This way, they know which cards they have without you knowing them, and you have a simple system.

Obviously it’s very easy for you to cheat, but if it’s just friendly play there’s no reason for you to do so, and therefore for your friend to believe so.

I suppose you could play blackjack, one person is the dealer, and follows the casino rules for dealer behavior, and has the deck of cards… informing the other of what their cards are.

but there’s no way to convey that information with just two people without both people knowing it, which means competitive poker is going to be a problem. your best bet would likely to be get some kind of app that lets you play against people in your contacts or something.

Use a shared external source of randomness, like one of the shortwave “numbers stations”, to seed an agreed upon algorithm that simulates shuffling a deck and dispensing the cards. You’re running the same code on the same data, so you could show the cards you had seen after each hand to confirm everyone is in sync.

Possible, but not practical

Use a game that sends turns that way.

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