Poke the Bear 🐻

Poke the Bear is a provably fair game where players take turns poking a sleeping bear.

One of these players will inevitably wake him — at which point, they’ll get mauled. Then, the survivors will split the loser’s entry fee.

How Is Poke the Bear Provably Fair?

TL;DR: it leverages Chainlink to ensure that a) the loser is picked randomly and b) the outcome cannot be figured out prior.

For a lengthier description of this process, check out the How It Works.

How Do I Join a Round?

Head over to the Poke the Bear lobby, and check out the caves.

Here, you’ll see how much time you have to join a round, the entry fee for that particular cave, and the number of spots remaining.

When you’ve identified the one for you, click on it. On the next screen, hit Join Now!

Depending on the number of seats left to fill, you may need to wait for more players to join before the round begins. Additionally, rounds might be (temporarily) paused if network fees are too high.

Can I Join Multiple Rounds at the Same Time?

Yep! In fact, if you want to save on gas fees, it might even make sense to purchase entries for subsequent rounds in the same cave, too.

How Do Rounds Play Out?

When all seats are filled, a player will be selected to poke the bear. They’ll have 15 seconds to do so, after which we’ll do it for them.

One of two things can happen:

• The bear continues to sleep, and the player can breathe a sigh of relief
• The bear awakens, and promptly mauls the player

Assuming the bear hasn’t woken up, this process will continue until he does.

What’s the Reward?

The loser’s entry fee (minus LooksRare’s fee of 2.5-5%) will be split among the survivors.

Can I Roll Over Entry Fees to Save on Gas?

You certainly can — and we encourage you to do so. You’ll be presented with the option any time a round is completed or canceled.

Note: winnings can’t be transferred to the next round, and must be claimed every time.

How It Works

Pre-round

A round starts only when all seats are filled. Different caves have different sizes and different entry fees (which can be paid either in LOOKS or ETH).

At this stage, LooksRare’s centralized backend shuffles each player’s index for multiple rounds. It then generates a keccak256 value based on the whole array (and a salt). The hashed value is then committed to the blockchain.

💡 This step ensures that players can’t figure out their index before their turn — while also ensuring that the game mechanics remain transparent.

During the round

When all values are committed, we query Chainlink for a random value (the index of the loser).

If, for any reason, Chainlink’s callback doesn’t come back within a day, players can withdraw from the round.

The end of the round

Finally, the LooksRare bot calls the reveal function to expose the loser’s index.