+1
Regs are not valuable and can be replaced by site-bots. Recs that deposit, lose it while having fun, and then deposit again and again are the most valuable element as their efforts keep the site in business and bring in others than want to play with them.

+1
As a rec I would also like the rematch option and most times not because the opponent is bad but because he took the game seriously and I enjoyed the challenge and appreciated some of his plays.

My honest 2cents on the upcoming UO in Vegas.

This was a bad decision by Unibet. The bad decision became compounded due to the legal aspects preventing them from releasing the schedule/location until recently. I don't blame Unibet for the latter as these issues do occur and I've seen that no site has been exempt from this issue.

The first point is also true imo. It's bad business and on many levels imo even if the event was announced on time like most UO's are.

1) The cost. It's 1KEURO more expensive than other UO's and the experience shouldn't be much better as the extra cost is going to the hotel and airfare. Furthermore for some Countries the tax on cashes over 5k is very real.

2) The travel. This is a long flight for many players and the issues with Visa's is very real when travelling to the US.

3) What's in it for Unibet? For all UO's there is value in that local players get a chance to be exposed to the Unibet brand and may deposit on the site because of it. In this case there is none of that in return as US poker isn't likely in the cards for Unibet. There is also value in advertising the brand name on various social platforms... but in this case it appears that "Wynn" will be taking much of the thunder.

I don't believe for a second that Unibet is trying to angle players on this package. It's not worth it to them. Unibet is losing a lot of money putting Live events on and they have since the very first one and will continue to lose on them. This is no exception. Live events are a loss leader where money is recouped through more players being lured to the site because of UO's.

All valid points. I am happy to be able to (soon) combine travelling with a Unibet Open in Bucharast ; this said, please bring Unibet to Canada and thus expand the market there. Has The Playground in Montreal ever been considered? It might be something to look into, especially given that it is rapidly becoming the player's favourite poker room in North America (and has comfortable chairs) :

Awesome photo. And your right that Montreal should get strong consideration for a future UO stop... Or a 1off event. Sadly I think Party has a monopoly on Playground. But there is a smaller card room down the road that can hold about 300 or so players and is nice. Forgot the name but it has a Star in it.
Montreal is a nice mecca for poker and I'm glad David said he's looking to grow in this market. Andrew said it wasn't a priority and I believe that was a mistake. Not a huge population, but Canada provides lots of disposable income type players. An event in Montreal would certainly bring in a lot of new players to Unibet.

A local tour with smaller buy-ins, similar to that of the UK tour would make the most sense for Canada, if promoting Unibet in that market ever became a bigger goal for them than it currently seems to be.

Having a regular UO tour stop there would make little sense when surely >95% of the qualifiers for UO events are European.

David - can you extend my double trouble ticket for another week please?

id: interesting

cheers

If we use the Playground as an example then the first hotel they recommend on their site would be $179 per night direct (€620 for 4 nights) + $1020 roughly for main event buy-in (€875) and use the Wynn rate for food at $90 a day (€310 for 4 days) you have just over €1800. That leaves €1200 for people to get a flight to Montreal and transfers.

I didn't check if the room included breakfast but I expect it does so you could probably have a €2500 package to Canada and get more people there taxed less on cheaper flights

Edit: You would think the number of euro qualifiers for a Canadian UO would actually decrease as more Canadians that don't normally try for the Euro UOs get involved for this one.

^^^^
Montreal is also home to the best pole-dancers and poutine in North America.

Hi David,

Any news on August promo's?

There has been many complaints itt about the "win a pot where at least 3 players have seen the flop" challenge and it remains the one I discard twice a month (yet still have to complete a few times monthly). What I find curious about this requirement, is that all other challenges seem to incentivize good play, you know, trying to encourage the casual (and all) players to 3bet more, defend their big blind accordingly, fold their weak Aces UTG etc., yet this one encourages us to play more passively (AKA bad), by seeing flops multiway, calling too light in the big blind, calling a raise on the button instead of 3betting etc.

Anyways, my 2 cents

How long until the casino buttons are removed from the poker tables and poker lobby? I mean if you want deposits to last longer at poker and improve the games you get rid of the casino games in the poker client!

+1 to this and the ratholing abusers also needs to be adressed.

Unless something has changed since Andrew departure then it's been mentioned several times that the casino buttons are not going anywhere.

You can hide them on SNG/MTT tables with the info box.

Going to respond to unanswered posts shortly but just wanted to post release notes first as we have a client release today (it's smaller than normal and focused more on bug fixing as a lot of devs have taken their vacation this month).

Poker release notes 26/07/2018 - v2.8.0

New Features and Improvements:

- Added the ability to exclude a tournament type from the filters in the Full Tournaments Schedule
- Promotion leaderboards are now integrated in the client (more improvements to come in the future regarding the way it works)
- Added sound when there are only few seconds left to act
- Changed sound when it is your turn to act (we may lower the volume of that sound depending on feedback - it doesn't need a client release)
- Added ‘Banzai Texas’ and ‘Banzai Omaha’ to filters under History > Challenge

Promotions:

- to follow shortly

Bug fixes:

- Fixed a problem with Android sounds not working as expected on some devices
- Fixed issue where Fold button was sometimes disappearing after short disconnection
- Fixed issue where an extra table was somethimes openeing
- Added DX10 exceptions to allow some players with old graphic cards to use download desktop client (we can add more exceions case by case if get reports from players)
- Fixed confirmation message sometimes missing when logging out

For now, only the Windows download client has been released. Web, Mac and Android will follow shortly today. iOS will likely take a couple of days before being available in the appstore.

Thanks for the report, that's been taken care of.

You can find the full list here, under term 3.1.3:

https://www.unibet.com/general-info/terms

Those are the .com terms, that's why countries like Denmark who can actually access the software are included.

In terms of VPNs, they're not allowed. If you have a specific list of countries you are visiting it might be worth contacting support to double check which ones you can play from while travelling.

We are making changes to the rat-holing policy in the near future. Even if nobody's EV is negatively affected under the current policy it does create a bad impression, I'll update on this once we agree here exactly what the changes will be.

Thanks, those are also taken care of.

Our ecology isn't as great as I would like right now although I also don't think it's as extreme as the picture you've painted.

We are making some changes to combat this over the next six months, changes that should make a difference in the long-term and not patch things up for a month or two.

Lowering the number of tables to two isn't going to happen but changes to where loyalty and promotional budgets are spent is likely. Races have featured more often than we would have liked this year because we had to get 2.0 up to a sufficient level and a lot of time was spent on improvements there.

Going forwards from September you should see positive changes for the ecology and this includes promos like races. We also need to push and push for new players (not just grinders) and this is at the top of the priority list here.

Deposit offers for Poker are going to be improved soon but I don't see higher rake as the answer. There is an argument for increasing rake so that a bigger portion can be given back to certain groups of players, but where have you heard that before? It's not something I'm keen to do, there are other ways we can be flexible with the budgets we have from the rake we already collect.

Fair feedback, we'll discuss it more here as this question hasn't come up much.

Regs are valuable, but perhaps not as much as some people think - we certainly wouldn't replace anyone with 'site-bots' though.

You can take away a significant group of high rakers and the site will still function - rake will dip in the short term but if tackled in the right way then things will grow over time. If you take away a significant amount of net-depositors then the site will die, and fairly quickly (we are talking months for a site of our size). This isn't opinion, it's a matter of fact.

This is why you see other sites seemingly disregard high raking players - they know that in the long term it isn't likely to affect them negatively. I massively disagree with the way those players have been communicated to about changes affecting them though. Even if you no longer care about a group of players it's probably in your interests to at least pretend you do...

I think the main motivation for this event was the fact that it's the 10 year anniversary and a lot of the regular UO players haven't been to Vegas before - this was a way of giving a special experience back to them.

However, I'm with you on some points, as a marketer it doesn't present me with a massive range of options to grab new players. I doubt we'll go back to Vegas next year but I know it will be a good event and the players who travel there will have a great time.

I did suggest The Playground last year but Canada wasn't really an option at that stage. As was suggested after your post, the ideal situation for me is a local tour in Canada, similar to what we offer in UK and Romania. It's something I'm looking into now, I might PM a few of the Canadians in this thread to pick their brains in the next few weeks

Done but please head to the Community Site for these in future.

Will post these ASAP, just waiting for the site page links to be sent over.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it on to Chris who takes care of this.

Yep, we won't be removing the casino buttons anytime in the near future. If you balance the amount of money coming into the Poker client from Casino players it far outweighs the amount spent on Casino games in the client.

If we want to keep that the way it is then we also have to have good visibility of Casino games in the Poker client, we can't expect the benefits to only go one way. There are also players who would argue that they want the buttons to remain because they also play those games and it makes life easier for them.

Thanks for agreeing to look into the possibility of HUSNG rematches!

Btw, though Stars' 'The Duel' project failed because of technical issues on various mobile devices, one decent idea that can be taken from it is its way of pairing players - a combination of two modes: play vs a random opponent and play vs a friend.

I understand that the friend list feature allows bumhunting (which Stars would battle by setting a low limit on the number of friends), but you can give a 'full disclosure' warning to new players, telling them that some opponents would want to add them just due to deeming them weaker, and advising to only accept friendship requests from those whom they know through other communication channels or who they don't mind losing to.

You may allow poker alias changes to be made known to friends, like it was at PKR that retained the friend lists even after the migration onto the MPN. Alternatively, you may ask a player to create a separate identity which will represent them in home games, while in games vs randoms, different temporary identities will still be used. The player will have an option to delete unwanted friends while still keeping the ever-changing 'vs randoms' identities in secret from the former and remaining friends.

As I said, friend lists can be abused, but forewarned is forearmed, and the feature does have a positive social upside. And it can be used not only for HU but to create 'home games' in general.

I wish those poker players who also play casino games from time to time wouldn't even be tempted to do so within the poker client/while playing poker or after sitting out in the first place...
But l mainly mean players who come to Unibet for poker only, they download the poker client from your website, maybe register an acc before the download and then deposit to play poker. They sit down and immediately see those casino game buttons and may check it out... Is that really in Unibet Poker's interest?

About rematches: Yes, but not at at rake increase expense as someone suggested.

Don't fool yourself - of course it is

Cross-selling various gambling products is a good way to ensure that fewer customers run away to another gambling site. A customer is more likely to stay loyal when Unibet offers different products, one or more of which the customer may like.

If Unibet were offering casino and betting only, then its patrons would churn to one of the many other casino and betting venues; however, due to the poker offering, they may want to try it out before leaving, and some of them will like the poker enough to stay at the site. When poker falls out of their favour, they'll be more likely to bet in the casino or on sports at Unibet again, rather than elsewhere, because loyalty will be built.

But of course every gambling operator would rather see its patrons gamble in the casino instead of poker because then it wouldn't have to share their deposits with longterm winning players. The catch is that some people are reluctant to play casino games initially; however, some fraction of them will try the casino out after getting their feet wet at poker.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but that's my view of the situation.

Well, if Unibet truly cares about the game of poker they remove those buttons from the poker client. Otherwise I'd be really quite about critizing your competitors if I were you while advertising casino gambling on your poker tables! Such a shame actually as I see Unibet Poker doing a lot of things really well imo.

As for the 'ecosystem health'...

I'm not going to take your claims about it for granted as they'll be rather unverifiable until Unibet starts disclosing the personal all-in EV / ICM EV data, filterable by game types and stakes, to every player, like GGNetwork does through its in-house result tracking tool PokerCraft (while not allowing 3rd party tools).

I regard your refusal to disclose all-in EV data as an attempt to increase the Dunning-Kruger effect so that players move up or increase their table count to the extent where they're losing or their profit is less than at the stakes that would be optimally profitable for them according to their relative skill level.

This is quite an important point that I'd like to clarify so I'll be really blunt and possibly too honest.

My personal background is purely poker and in my role my interest is purely in growing Unibet Poker. I can see that Unibet Casino has a lot more to offer Unibet Poker than the other way around and so cynically, I'd like to take advantage. Sending casino players to poker is good for traffic, good for ecology and great for the long-term health of our games.

Taking advantage means having links to Casino in the poker client because this will make it easier to convince the casino team to send their players our way. Removing the links would mean no more xsell from casino to poker - that would hurt me in my ambitions and it would definitely hurt you as poker players.

I agree that gambling operators on the whole would prefer that players play casino than poker as they don't have to share with winning poker players. Luckily for us, the company I work for realises that offering poker is an important part of their business and are happy to accept that trade off - in the current situation, everybody wins. I can take a critical view of poker sites who have stated it is their aim to xsell their poker players into casino in order to earn more revenue as that's not what I or anyone involved with Unibet Poker is aiming to do. There is a big difference between advertising these games on our tables to serve a greater purpose and actively trying to move everyone over to casino.

It's important that I make this clear now because it may well be that we do even more to make casino visible in future (the release last month added functionality for us to credit free casino spins in the poker client). As a poker player I'd also be cynical about a site trying to push me into casino but in this instance there is good reasoning behind it and it benefits everyone who plays poker on this site.

The day that I'm pressured to sell-out on a principle I hold strongly would be the day that I leave (knowing this company and the people running it, I don't envision that day coming). You only have my word to take for that but feel free to call me out on it if ever it looks like I've lied on this.

Free casino spins in poker client, ok. Free sng tickets in casino client?

Indeed, those claims are unverifiable and it's highly unlikely we'll be disclosing all-in EV data any time soon. That isn't so that we can con players into suffering cognitive dissonance about their own ability, it ties into wider policies we have. I'm also not going to expand on measures of the ecology we take because there's a fine line between being open with players and turning your business into an open book for competitors to read from.

You're entitled to think that I am trying to con you of course and I'm a faceless site rep to you so I don't really take offence. I'm extremely open here (as Andrew was before me) so I'm not sure what else could be done to satisfy you at this point. By your own admission you haven't actually played at Unibet recently (if ever) so I have to consider it a troll to some degree if you're going to attempt to poo-poo me on everything stated here.

Genuine frustrations with our site or causes for concern are what this thread is for but I don't want to get into a constant stream of arguing every point of our site just for the sake of arguing it.