Hi guys, back after a bit of a hiatus- I'm glad you managed to get your earlier technical issues in check! Congrats!

Why don't you have a rat catching policy? I just had a short stack double up on me and then immediately leave the table before coming back instantly into the same seat with the same short stack buyin; this really shouldn't be allowed to happen...

chipdumping
https://gyazo.com/c7ea33a65321efbbb114b5b656e183de
https://gyazo.com/593d7e1f0d708bf20f06669c267cc162

Totaly agree, double rake is even more frustrating, when flying 15h, just to play turbo tournament for 960e, and have an absolute astonishing accommodation for 4nights, that costs even more than the tournament... thats absolutely amazing and special event, for sure.

We can't do something immediately but I agree, general feedback seems to be that the games have been hit and miss recently.

There are some things we can try to do to support those games in the short term but it's something we're going to refocus heavily on in the longer term (not just NL100 but ecology in all games)

Have you contacted customer support regarding this? I can't investigate individual incidents directly from my end but they should be able to organise compensation in events like this.

I'm going to skip out the rest of the messages essentially saying the same thing as your post summarizes most of it.

I asked the events team for a more detailed breakdown. The hotel rooms are charged at two different rates - $169 for weekdays and $199 for weekends. The price increases by $50 if you have a twin room. There is also a resort fee of $40 per day, $40 per day for breakfast, $50 per day for dinner. Tax is added to that (23% or so). That takes us to a package of roughly €3,000. This is before any extra costs like players parties, welcome drinks, merchandise, free drinks, group dinners, etc - those costs are all taken by Unibet and do not come out of the cost of the package (that is the same for every event).

I understand that players would want a breakdown of these costs and you're entitled to that, although I doubt another site would give you a full breakdown. The aim was not to announce the venue so late and that was a real disappointment on our side - legal issues held a lot of that up. We've definitely learned lessons for future events and I'm sorry if the late announcement has caused issues for some players.

However, I do feel a need to comment on this other exchange on the same topic:

Kanaxis, the site does not exist to provide you with +EV hunting opportunities and Unibet Open is designed to try to provide players with great experiences, not to subsidize their 'salary'.

If you're familiar with the philosophy behind our online client then you might see a parallel with Unibet Open events - as a pro you are more than welcome to take part but the site will not be catering to your every need. Most players enjoy the parties, free merch and opportunities to socialise with other players. If that's not what you're after then there might other tours out there more suited.

If you have had a bad experience with the online site or a Unibet Open event then I am very willing to listen to that because it's something I'd like us to try to improve for future. But please don't berate players in this thread because they're a 'freaking nl 10 player'. There are plenty of other threads on 2+2 for that.

Bug has been reported, thanks.

The last BE Champs qualifier should take place on Sunday 20th.


Aiming to post replies to the other posts tomorrow before lunchtime.

Thank you. I don't want to have an exact breakdown, that's not needed at all.
I just was very confused about the very expensive prize for hotel+food. I hope it will be worth it, 40$ for breakfast also seems insane.
Thx for your clarifications

Just one general comment about ur statement about the games, don't forget it are the Regs who make the games run. It is important to find a healthy balance here. Without the Regs/Pros, there won't be successful games on your site and not a successful Unibet Open .

Sorry for my upcoming rant - obviously, I've never been a fan of Unibet since its divorce with Microgaming, and I'm going to explain why.

I think your radical philosophy is the reason why your poker is still smaller than 888's.

You'd be bigger if you were centrist - strived to keep every customer happy in some way, in terms of either fun or a bit of $EV.

Online poker is a separate experience that shouldn't be made as close to live one as possible, should have its own flavour, in particular, it should allow to play as many hands an hour as possible, without waiting until regs click all the buttons manually at their lot of tables that they'll be playing anyway.

When you focus on live poker, you suffer from a lot of overhead - hotels, airlines and casino dealers take money out of the online poker economy that would otherwise be deposited and split amicably between you (mostly) and a moderate number of winners if you focused on providing a unique online experience (like my new darling Power Up).

Or at least, you'd cut the overhead costs if you organised small but frequent local poker meetups in various European countries and Canadian provinces, offering a high proportion of seat-only packages (without forced hotel booking when some of the customers live within driving distance from the venue or are OK with booking a hostel bed) instead of urging your customers to fly across the ocean to get access to fun.

Obviously, I have no clue about how much the hotels pay to you in affiliate commissions, but anyway, I'm not convinced that gathering people at a brick-and-mortar casino is the way to provide them with the most fun per euro spent.

I agree - I was a high stakes reg on other sites for almost 10 years and would often give the site a hard time if I felt that my loyalty or value as a game starter/traffic driver/rake generator wasn't being rewarded appropriately. For years sites fell over themselves to make those players happy and heavily neglected every other player type.

There is a happy middle ground which no site has perfected yet. We're aiming to but there's still a way to go of course. We're not neglecting or penalising regs but a site has to cater for and listen to everyone else on the ladder too otherwise there are no players left 10 more years from now.

I don't think the philosophy is too different but maybe our execution hasn't lived up to par for you.

The centre ground is where we are aiming and we don't need to compromise on values to get there. The aim isn't to make the online environment similar to the live environment (I'm not sure where that idea came from), the original aim was to create a level playing field so that casual and new players to the game got more value for the money they invested.

I'm not sold on the idea of Power Up at all (although I haven't played it). Hearthstone was almost a throwaway idea by Blizzard at first and even they might struggle to tell you why it was so successful as a standalone game. Simply using that as a template for a poker variant isn't solving anything imo.

Couldn't disagree more, it's the recs that make the games run. If there were no recs, the regs wouldn't play. It's this type of false thinking, that sent most sites into decline over the last number of years.

Poker games can indeed run without regs. However, adding a small number of winning Twitch streamers or otherwise charismatic personas, which Unibet is already doing, helps the games run even better.

Hearthstone can't be so lucrative because it lacks variance. Any real-money game mixing the standard poker deck with any fantasy inventory where the dealing is random enough to allow everyone to beat the pros once in a while is going to be more popular than Hearthstone that is largely skill-based. The main purpose of the new inventory is to make the game less vulnerable to bots because the properties of the inventory can be changed frequently without alienating the audience as much as a rule change in a traditional poker game would do.

As an example of how a small change can have a dramatic effect, a change of the starting energy balance in Power Up from 20 (which is enough for 4-7 spells) to 10, while 2 energy points are added each hand, probably changes the strategy a lot because energy (mana) management is a big part of the strategy of the game that requires to design a plan for the entire SNG, not just for each hand in isolation, and it's harder for a bot to figure out the influence of each decision on the entire remainder of the SNG than on a single hand.

I'd argue that you're both right. Sites needs regs to start games and maintain liquidity but sites need 'recs' in order to attract regs to the site. I hate the word 'recreational' player btw as there's always been a negative connotation that a recreational player is a happy losing player and eventually people just seemed to see it as a nicer way to say 'fish'.

I prefer the term 'casual' player and sites need casual players of all backgrounds. Some casual players become regs and eventually they tire or fall out of love with the game, or just happen to hone their interest on something else.

If you have a steady stream of brand new casual players and the site is managed well then some will develop into regular players. A good site should aim to take care of both of those sets of players and everyone in between - most poker players will pass through each stage at some point.

I would counter with two points.

Hearthstone is very heavy on variance and is a game where anyone could beat the pros more than once in a while, assuming that the decks are even. I also think that adding more intricacy to a game (Poker) which already has scope for high level strategic thinking could limit it's appeal to a real niche group of players. That's not to say that I think poker should be dumbed down of course

Oops, I meant the change from 15 to 10 starting points, the maximum being 20 (which is perhaps too much).

Also, the fact that there are 9 powers (= spells) in Power Up but one can hold only 3 simultaneously, and that powers are dealt randomly (1 per hand if the player has fewer than 3, and always not the same that the ones that the user already has), implies that any change of the properties of a power may influence the strategy for the entire SNG because it may become more or less worthwhile for a player to wait for that particular power to be dealt to them.

That said, the addition of new inventory is not the only and probably not the cheapest way to make a game more interesting and less solvable. This job can be done by any tweak to a standard 52-card deck game that makes the EV less dependent on the outcome of a single hand and more dependent on the strategy for the whole tournament.

As another example, PKOs and especially their extreme case, total KOs (previously known as Terminator tournaments at PKR), require much deeper insight into the tournament at-large as opposed to separate hands; there's no simple formula (like ICM) that would approximate the expected dollar value of a stack accurately enough - this value depends on many factors like the total amount of bounties left in play, the number of opponents at the table and in the entire tourney field whom Hero is covering, and the presence of opponents with particularly large bounty-to-stack ratios.

I agree, Hearthstone has way too many cards. That's why the alpha version of Power Up had only 9 special powers, but they were really potent (some of them essentially allowed to draw 1-2 extra cards from the poker deck).

****, I respect your posts and contribution to this forum, but I think that if you would play Unibet more you would see that it's really not that different from all the sites anymore, because the fish are drying out drastically quickly as regs are adding other sites to Pokerstars. Now you have a situation where 10 € HU SNG is a 16 hour a day reg war, god knows what is happening on cash tables where regs multitable even more.

I really pray for Unibet to get radical, to lower the number of tables to two of the same game type and to cut down rakeback, quit rakeraces etc. I already gave some suggestions for channels of promotion.

The point is, Unibet is getting harder and harder to play on, it is already tougher then 888, and considerably so and great Unibet guys need to be even more brave in the measures they take, in my opinion.

First i have to say that this has nothing to you with you David but i wanna answer this because im not happy with that answer which events team gave you.

I tried booking directly from Wynn website. I used their offer but i wont believe that Unibet isnt getting at least same offer so adding hotel prices from Vegas to original price without any discount is something im not happy because every hotel is competing of customers and giving lot of discounts. I got total price of $1011 and that includes taxes, resort fee and breakfast for 2 person. Its Wynn Deluxe King room. And once more its directly from Wynn own website. So only thing we need to add is dinner for that so then total would be $1211.

That total is 1041€ so not as much as events team gave but maybe they might have very bad deal then with Wynn if they are paying as much as they said. ;-)

And about the thing am i taking part im still considering because it was disappointment for at least for me because i expected to get even more nights or more travel money or then at least higher buyin event than usually but now it seems to be even lower buyin than normally. For myself only flight will cost a lot more than that 750e and then if i add my girlfriend it end up that i pay about 1,5k from my own pocket more to have change to play under 1k tournament. Need to have quite high ROI to make at least breakeven. Maybe i just change that package to some event in future.

I'm refraining from playing at Unibet because I know that I'm not welcome here (even though it's possible to play at 6 tables, it's not fun when no hotkeys are built in) and I hate feeling unwelcome.

I think the games are becoming rather unprofitable because, in my impression, Unibet's focus has been mainly on helping weak players lose slower, not on being so interesting to them that they'd spend a bigger part of their monthly entertainment budgets on poker.

While it's true that a customer is more likely to deposit more lifetime if s/he loses at a slower rate, I'm afraid that s/he will still be depositing less money per month on average (David is welcome to prove me wrong) and thus the poker economy will be growing slower and strong players will be winning slower too. (Is it better to win €5K a month for 3 years or €1K a month for 20 years? I'd rather win less overall but do so while I'm still young.)

That's why poker sites have been trying to tap into other markets (mobile gaming, skilled gaming) to attract those people who're yet outside the gambling world, instead of just retaining the existing gamblers.

As you might have noticed, I'm still feeling bullish about the poker economy, while Unibet seems to feel bearish about it.

It's definitely possible that the events team didn't get much of a (if any) discount. The Wynn Classic series is taking place that week so the hotel could probably expect a lot of business either way (a bigger buyin event takes place at the Wynn during the series).

I just went through the booking process on the Wynn site myself, booking the cheapest room in the hotel with breakfast included. I ended up with a total of $1,419.53 (that's with a $60 saving, not sure which offer you took).

https://reservations.wynnlasvegas.co...gID=0&currID=0

I completely understand the dilemma this event poses for some players and it's not an ideal situation for all. There is genuinely no attempt by us to profit from the event on the backs of players' packages though.

I dont know how to add pictures of that reservation so cant link it but there is qyazo link for it just to proof that im not lying.

https://gyazo.com/825613d4b92f716a930c3b04a8d3adaf

But yeah anyway package will be what it is and we cant make any changes to that anymore. Im looking forward to meet you in Vegas in case i decide to take part.

A lot of travel websites offer different prices to different countries. Could be the case here.

Why do you feel unwelcome?

There has certainly been a focus on making initial deposits from new poker players last longer because that is key to someone actually having the chance to find out whether or not they enjoy the game and at least practice poker as a hobby (let alone become a regular). Such was the state of the ecology five years ago that no improvement in this area would have meant no future for Unibet Poker. A site can't spend money advertising to a new player if that player loses their initial deposit and interest in the game so quickly while the site collect a few cents in rake.

Poker sites are fighting for share of wallet (the amount someone is willing to spend on a given activity, for the uninitiated) against other poker sites AND other forms of entertainment. Share of wallet in poker doesn't only take the form of deposits (we are not a house game, players don't win or lose money on their deposit against us) but also the form of 'time spent' (as revenue/rake is driven by time spent playing any one deposit).

A cynical poker site should then just think 'let's make it a completely even game, remove the skill and let rake churn forever'. That obviously shouldn't be an option either. If we're good at our jobs then we encourage more deposits and more time spent playing the game because what we offer provides value for money.

Apologies if you got the wrong impression, I didn't think you were lying. I'm not entirely sure why are are being offered different rates.

Unfortunately I won't be able to make it to Vegas (the first event I'm missing in three years). If you make it to Bucharest later this year or any event next year then we'll definitely say hi then.

I have already package to Bucharest also so quite sure im making it to there at least so lets meet there and have a beer or couple.. ;-)

Hi David,

Unfortunately I have to add another bug report to the already existing ones.
I just played the Belgian Championship €20 qualifier (19.30CET), and there were 3 places paid (3x 90bc ticket), however when someone was eliminated in 4th place, there was another hand played, completely unneccesary since we were all 3 guarenteed a 90 ticket already. After that hand the tournament stopped like it should normally. The tournament number was 6161492.

I hope you can fix these tournament bugs very soon, because they are getting crazier every day.

Isn't this problem solved by a combination of high rake, a fast-clearing first deposit bonus and personal reload offers sent exclusively to weak players, so that they gradually start raking more when they get hooked on the game?

..and chests. Ohhh, and hire Dnegs.

I'd rather pay 5% rake in HUSNGs with 'random' (blind) initial seating (to prevent cartels) but allowed rematches than 3% rake in HUSNGs where consenting adults who desire to keep playing with me are denied such an opportunity. Rematches are a substantial part of the fun of HU. I may sometimes want to play a long match vs the Isildur of my stakes where I'm a clear underdog, just to learn from his moves and improve my skill, but that doesn't mean that I want to run into Isildur in every other game during the daily grind.

Rake fast, win fast, retire young.