I've been a poker grinder since the lockdown days of 2020. Somewhere around late 2023, I realized I was spending more time reading blockchain docs than studying hand histories. Not because I wanted to become a dev—because I kept hitting walls with poker dapps and wanted to understand why.
Here's what I learned the hard way: building a poker dapp that people actually want to use isn't about picking the "best" blockchain. It's about picking the one that matches what your players care about.
This isn't a comparison post. It's a field guide based on actual mistakes I've made and fixes I've found.
The First Big Choice: Where Do Your Players Live?
If you're building for casual mobile players, your chain choice is almost made for you.
TON integrates directly with Telegram. No browser extensions, no seed phrase management, no "please install MetaMask" hurdles. Your players join a game from a chat. That's it. I ran a test session where I onboarded three friends who had never touched crypto. Two of them were in a game within 90 seconds. The third took two minutes because he had to update Telegram.
The tradeoff? TON's smart contract ecosystem is younger. You'll spend more time writing and testing your own code for things like random number generation and hand evaluation. The audit history is thinner. I've seen poker dapps on TON where the RNG implementation had subtle flaws that wouldn't survive a proper audit.
Ethereum (especially with L2s like Arbitrum or Optimism) gives you battle-tested tools. Solidity has been around since 2015. You can find audited code for provably-fair shuffling, payout distribution, and escrow. But your onboarding flow will always have friction. Every new player needs a wallet, some ETH for gas, and a basic understanding of how not to lose their keys.
Practical checklist for choosing:
- Do your players already use Telegram? → TON
- Do you need complex game logic (multi-table tournaments, side pots, insurance)? → Ethereum
- Is speed more important than audit depth right now? → TON
- Are you building for high-stakes players who demand maximum security? → Ethereum
Transaction Costs Will Kill Your Game If You Ignore Them
I learned this the expensive way. In 2022, I tried playing micro-stakes poker on Ethereum mainnet. A single hand cost $2-5 in gas during peak hours. My buy-in was $10. You do the math.
TON processes transactions in seconds with fees under a penny. I played a session where I folded 40 hands and paid less total fees than one Ethereum transaction. That's massive for casual games where people are playing $5-20 buy-ins.
But here's the catch: TON's speed comes from a sharding design that excels at simple transfers. Complex smart contracts—like a tournament structure with re-entries and bounties—are slower and less tested. Ethereum's L2 solutions have brought fees down significantly, but they still can't match TON's raw throughput for basic chip transfers.
What I actually do now:
- Use TON for quick cash games with simple rules
- Use Ethereum (via Arbitrum) for tournament formats that need complex state management
- Test everything on testnet first with realistic player counts
The RNG Problem Nobody Talks About
When I first joined a TON poker game, something felt off. The variance seemed tighter than probability would suggest. I couldn't prove anything, but my gut said the RNG wasn't clean.
This isn't a criticism of TON. It's a practical warning: newer platforms have fewer eyes on the code. Ethereum has thousands of developers who have tested and broken poker contracts over nearly a decade. TON's FunC and Tact languages are newer, and the audit history is thinner.
I've since learned to look for specific things in any poker dapp's RNG implementation:
- Is the seed source verifiable on-chain?
- Can players verify the shuffle after the hand?
- Is the code audited by a third party?
If the answer to any of these is "no," I don't play there.
Where ChainPoker Fits In
I stumbled across ChainPoker while looking for a TON-based poker client that actually worked. It's one of the few platforms that gets the onboarding right—join via Telegram, click a link, start playing. The RNG is verifiable, and they've published their smart contract code. It's not perfect, but it's the closest I've found to a TON poker experience that doesn't feel like a beta test.
The lesson I keep learning: the blockchain doesn't matter if the user experience is broken. ChainPoker works because they focused on what casual players need—fast games, low fees, and no wallet setup—before optimizing for maximum decentralization.
What I'd Build Today
If I were starting a poker dapp project tomorrow:
- Prototype on TON for speed and onboarding. Use their testnet to get a working game in days, not weeks.
- Port complex logic to Ethereum if you need advanced features. Don't try to build everything on one chain.
- Audit your RNG early. This is the thing that will break your game if done wrong.
- Test with real players, not bots. The way humans interact with a poker dapp is different from what you expect.
The blockchain landscape in 2026 is better than it was in 2023. TON and Ethereum serve different needs. Pick the one that matches your players, not the one that looks cooler on a whitepaper.
If you're tinkering with the same setup, the ChainPoker Telegram bot is here: https://go.chainpk.top/r/geo_auto_202606_t_20260518_122000_8072
