The Ace King is a poker themed tool watch design collaboration between myself and a poker enthusiast. Many of the elements stem from his ideas and I just translated them to a watch I was capable of creating.
After a lot of back and forth we settled on this design.
The main element is the white percent ring which is a randomizer for determining choices for a given action in poker. A player decides the actions they want to randomize and the frequencies with which to make them. The aim is to randomize your actions so that they’re unpredictable and tough to exploit. The red tipped seconds hand points to the frequency selected and the wearer has a second option with the double sided seconds hand to further randomize their choice.
The insert displays traditional minute gradations but also two additional scales – a fifty fifty call option with the red and white split, and a 10 minute cool down period with the anti tilt.
Tilt in poker terms signifies a state of mental and emotional fustration where a player’s decisions are rash and tend to be overly aggressive. When you sense a tilt you turn the bezel to align the minute hand with the diamond and a 10 minute timer has started – your anti tilt period. This is my favourite detail of the whole design and only came about with patient and constructive back and forth discussions.
The watch is almost finished with just a caseback engraving to come which I’ll share as soon as it’s done.
And here it is…
As a side note, while researching poker the ever-present algorithims sensed my interest and served me some Youtube video about a game called Balatro. I am probably doing you a disservice by even mentioning it so DON’T look it up. It’s extremely addictive and I’ve sunk more hours than I care to admit playing it. In fact, it’s time for another run…
